New FFOF recipe? (P.S. ...it sucks)

Recently bought an "on sale" bag of Fox Farm Ocean Forest for $20.00. I just opened it to fill up a pot and instantly noticed it was a clumped up wet (even though the bag was inside..) slab of soil that did not break apart too easily. After putting it in the pot I noticed it had numerous pieces of what looked like mulch and also small twigs. Also there appears to be significantly less perlite.. An well to be blatantly honest it looks like someone just took some Miracle Grow Organic soil and added a bunch of worm casting with a little bit of perlite. Absolutely nothing like the bags I bought from another hydroponic store in FL this time last year.. I think I remember reading some where that Fox Farm setup an east coast facility to manufacture their products to mitigate the high cost of shipping from the west coast, could this new "recipe" I came across be from their new East Coast factory which produces a lesser quality than its west coast counterpart?


If this is what I can expect from Fox Farm than ill be switching to Roots Organic / Botanicare in a heart beat... to bad I just bought the bush doctor line up .

AFAIK the facility on the east coast is\was just a storage warehouse and distribution hub. A bag of Ocean Forest purchased not too long ago from the region seemed fine. Mistakes in manufacturing do occur of course. Small twigs and 'mulch' like particles are probably from the sphagnum or the forest humus in the product.

i've spoken directly to customer service and received different answers, but the most common answer i got was that the east coast facility uses pine bark and the west coast uses redwood bark. i got this answer 3 times as opposed to getting told there's only 1 facility once. i've heard other people say they called and were told there's 1 facility. call the number on the bag and report back what they say. i'd love to know how varied of answers they give out. a lot of people on the east coast have been griping, but they supposedly implemented this change over two years ago, so i don't know how anyone would suddenly notice this unless their source has been selling old bags.

I remember reading complaints of Ocean Forest having 'big pieces of' or 'mostly mulch' or whatever since I've been on here, so these complaints are nothing new. I just can't say I've ever had problems with any of the bags I have purchased.

A note on contacting FF or any other nutrient\fertilizer\soil company for that matter... I would imagine you'd get a much more thorough and accurate response if you just e-mailed them. People paid to answer phones are mostly likely... just paid to answer phones. Maybe they've been trained as to how to respond to basic or frequently asked questions and know a little bit about the product lines, but that's about it. So when you call up a place like this and get somebody who is just paid to answer phones and you put them on the spot by asking a question they might not necessarily even know the answer to, perhaps they would be more inclined to wing it and just say anything, or whatever sounds good to them at the time. If you e-mail the company instead, you give whoever is responding to your e-mail the time and the opportunity to do any research that may need to be done in order to properly respond to the inquiry.