Tag Archives: market

To build trust, market food safety at retail, especially after an outbreak that kills

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How should retailers market cantaloupe after last year’s listeria outbreak killed at least 33 and sickened at least another 146?

Armand Lobato, who works for the Idaho Potato Commission, has some ideas, which he shared in The Packer.

“As a produce manager, I would build a display appropriate for a generations-old relationship, not only between the bonafide, reputable growers and our chain but considering what the shipper brands and the Rocky Ford name have come to mean to our customers.

“I would make sure the display is placed prominently in the produce department, with a hearty spillover, as neatly well-stocked and rotated as any other display.

“I would also provide information for customers who wanted more information about the melons (as I’m sure the chain would provide anyhow). I would post this on the back of my large easel-sized sign and include what steps have been taken since last season. If I was the produce manager I would make sure that my crew knew every detail so they could answer customers’ questions, face-to-face.”

Sounds like marketing food safety at retail. I’m a fan of that. When Maple Leaf deli meats killed 23 Canadians in 2008, there were no such displays at retail. There was lots of talk, but to really regain trust, be completely transparent – and that includes safety data available to those who want it.

Best Western goes high-tech to clean

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When I think Best Western, I think free wi-fi.

Maybe I should be thinking, cleaner rooms.

There’s a certain snobbery about hotel rooms similar to restaurants: dives are dirty, fancy ones are clean.

Decades of restaurant inspection data show bacteria and other bugs don’t discriminate; they’re equal-opportunity contaminants. Data from hotels is starting to show the same (don’t let the bed bugs bite).

The best thing about Best Western is they’re marketing cleanliness. Just like food providers should be doing.

USA Today reports Best Western Hotels, in response to what it says is travelers’ insistence on cleanliness, is equipping its housekeeping crews with black lights to detect biological matter otherwise unseen by the human eye, and ultraviolet light wands to zap it.

For possibly the dirtiest object in your room — the TV remote control — there will be disposable wraps.

Best Western says it’s taking the steps partly because research from Booz & Company shows that travelers desire a hotel’s cleanliness over customer service, style and design.

But it’s also reacting to the times, in which hotels and supermarkets place hand sanitizer in visible places for germ-obsessed customers (Australia, you paying attention yet?).

People also have become more skeptical about cleanliness because of headlines about E. coli, norovirus and bird flu, says Ron Pohl, a Best Western vice president.

Lemon juice is icky too; be honest with consumers and disclose what’s in any food

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“There’s an ick factor to almost all food."

That was my short-take on the pink slime smearfest, which has now dragged retailers, along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, into the murky morass where public opinion intersects with scientific evidence.

This is nothing new.

Me, I find E. coli and salmonella in raw sprouts icky.

Other people find ammonium hydroxide, or pink slime, icky. People may soon discover they find citric acid icky because that’s what Cargill uses to yield finely textured beef and reduce the pathogen load.

It’s pink, it’s meat, it’s lean finely textured beef – LFTB yo – versus pink slime in public opinion, and processors, retailers and government spokesthingies are acting like they’ve never encountered a food-related, or any risk-related issue where public opinion is different from scientific advice.

It’s theatre, like a Mike Daisey production.

Mike Hughlett of the Minneapolis Star Tribune writes today that Supervalu Inc., one of the nation’s largest grocery chains, will no longer sell hamburger containing an ammonia-treated beef filler dubbed "pink slime" by some food critics and a growing chorus of consumers.

The Eden Prairie-based company, which owns local supermarket leader Cub Foods, on Wednesday joined several fast-food chains and other major grocery operators in removing the controversial beef filler from hamburger sold in its outlets.

"This decision was due to ongoing customer concerns about these products," said Mike Siemienas, a Supervalu spokesman.

While ammonia-treated hamburger filler has gotten most of the popular attention, Supervalu also said its ban on so-called "finely textured beef" includes meat treated with citric acid, which is made by Minnetonka-based Cargill Inc.

California-based Safeway Inc., another national grocery chain, also Wednesday said it nixed sales of both ammonia-treated and citric acid-treated ground beef fillers. Cargill spokesman Mike Martin acknowledged that some of its grocery industry customers have eliminated finely textured beef.

"There have been customers who have contacted us because they have been contacted by consumers who are interested and concerned," Martin said.

Did Safeway and Supervalu stores get eggs from those nasty DeCoster farms in Iowa that sickened some 2,000 people with salmonella in 2010. Did they rely on crappy food safety audits to make their decision. If they are so concerned about consumer concerns, why won’t they provide information on egg suppliers? Or any other food?

Choice is a good thing. I’m all for restaurant inspection disclosure, providing information on genetically-engineered foods (we did it 12 years ago), knowing where food comes from and how it’s produced.

But I want to choose safe food. Who defines safety or GE or any other snappy dinner-table slogan drop? Removing pink slime hamburgers reduces my choice to buy microbiologically safe food.

USDA and the companies that previously outlawed pink slime acted expediently to manage a public-relations event. But they unwillingly undercut other efforts to provide safe, sustainable food.

What is USDA going to do about school lunch purchases containing genetically-engineered ingredients, hormones, antibiotics, and a whole slew of politically-loaded ingredients or production practices?

If consumers want to become food connoisseurs and safety experts, more power to them. I view my job, and the job of farmers, processors, distributors and retailers, regardless of political leanings, to make evidence-based information available and let people decide.

Market microbial food safety and hold producers and processors – conventional, organic or otherwise – to a standard of honesty. Be honest with consumers and disclose what’s in any food; if restaurant inspection results can be displayed on a placard via a QR code read by smartphones when someone goes out for a meal, why not at the grocery store? Or the school lunch? For any food, link to websites detailing how the food was produced, processed and safely handled, or whatever becomes the next theatrical production – or be held hostage.

X-ray food: companies do it to avoid recalls and protect their brand names

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I agree with Steve Alexander of the Minnesota Star Tribune when he writes, “If consumers only knew what went into food safety, they might think they’d slipped into a James Bond movie.”

Which is why I’ve been urging companies, producers, retailers, to publicly flaunt their food safety efforts for 20 years, and am now convinced an effective way to build a food safety culture within any operation from farm-to-fork is public marketing of food safety efforts.

At Legendary Baking in Chaska, the pies it makes for Bakers Square restaurants and local grocery stores are X-rayed to make sure there’s nothing inside but pie.

The completely automated machines X-ray a pie and use a computer to analyze the image in a second or less, then eject it from the assembly line if it appears to contain a foreign object.

That’s not unusual in the food industry, where products have long been subjected to X-ray machines, metal detectors or special weighing devices to weed out objects such as metal or plastic parts that might fall off an assembly line.

"We have been using X-rays for seven years to eliminate the potential for dense foreign objects in products," said Steven Hawkes, general manager of the bakery in Chaska, a unit of American Blue Ribbon Holdings in Denver.

Hawkes declined to say whether the machines had ever found any foreign objects in pies.

While assembly line X-ray machines are expensive — they sell for tens of thousands of dollars each — food companies find the cost is well worth it, said Ted Labuza, a food engineer in the Food Science and Nutrition Department at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.

"Compared to the cost of product liability lawsuits, X-ray machines are cheap," Labuza said. "Under Minnesota law, manufacturers are 100 percent liable if their product causes damage, and in most other states it’s the same."

The X-ray machines, which cost $45,000 to $70,000 each, are about 98 percent accurate in detecting contaminant particles as small as 1 to 2 millimeters in diameter, said Bob Ries, Thermo Fisher’s lead product manager for metal detection and X-ray products.

At Legendary Baking, the Thermo Fisher machines can scan one or two pies per second, Ries said.

Consumers might be surprised to know how many products they use have been X-rayed, Ries said: "anything in foil, foil tops or cans" and a lot of glass bottles.

"If you walk through a grocery store, there’s a 99.9 percent chance that a product there went through either an X-ray machine or a metal detector," Ries said. "Companies do it to avoid recalls and protect their brand names."

What those X-ray googles to help see bacteria that might be contaminating a $0.50 pot pie?

Foodborne outbreaks are not acts of god; the best providers take responsibility for their food

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Amy was asking me about something speculative and that I said trying to predict such things was a mug’s game.

The language professor asked, what’s that?

A foolish, profitless or hopeless undertaking.

Predicting U.S. allotments for federal agencies is an endless mug’s game that I choose to ignore. I have enough trouble dealing with what’s going on today. Others thrive on that stuff.

The Washington Post has a story today about a putative boost in funding for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration agreed to by Congress (but not the Senate or the President) that I will ignore but does have a couple of juicy quotes about food safety.

“I mean God forbid to have another recall like this. . . . It just froze the market,” said Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh, chief executive of Fresh Del Monte Produce in a call with analysts this month. He was talking about the 2006 E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in spinach.

God doesn’t have a lot to do with it. He or she or they probably have other things to do than micromanage outbreaks of foodborne illness or help you make that crucial putt on 18.The vast majority of foodborne outbreaks are not acts of god, they are the result of individually minor food safety mistakes in a culture that relegates food safety to a paragraph in the annual report that, over time, synergistically accumulate eventually making people barf or die.

The story notes that major recalls linked to foodborne illnesses exact real and reputational costs by shaking consumer confidence, but fails to answer the question: would listeria-in-cantaloupe, salmonella-in-peanut crap, E. coli in leafy things have been prevented by a stronger FDA?

Doubtful.

I’m all for a regulatory presence that is consistent and evidence-based, farm-to-fork. But that ain’t going to do much for people who will be barfing after eating food today.

Scott Faber, a vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said, “At a time when some industries are trying to handcuff their regulators, the food industry is advocating for a stronger regulator with more powers and more resources. … We’re competing with manufacturers all over the world. Maintaining and burnishing FDA’s reputation helps us open doors in those markets.”

Sounds nice but the responsibility to produce safe food lies with the producer, processor, retailer, restaurant, whoever is dishing it up. An industry group wanting more government oversight is also saying, we give up, it’s your problem.

Those that care about safe food will stop wasting their time with government and get on with it; then brag about it; then capture more market at retail.

The rest is a mug’s game.

Band of Mexican produce growers wants to market food safety at retail … soon

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I’m still waiting for some brave food producer to start marketing food safety at retail because I don’t care if lettuce and spinach are local, natural, sustainable, and was produced without harming any animals: I do care if it has E. coli and I want to know what a brand is doing about it. At the grocery store. Where I decide what brand to buy.

A group of Mexican produce producers is, according to The Packer, planning to invest in the issue with the Eleven Rivers Growers food safety and quality assurance label.

And while starting with the supply chain, the group wants the labels at retail by 2013.

“We believe that we will have 22 or 23 producers (under the label),” said Fernando Mariscal, cooperative representative. “Most important, we are expecting to have production around 40 million 25-pound boxes for this winter season.

"We’ll start the process with weekly inspections that are not going to be announced,” Mariscal said.

The unannounced part is good, but Eleven Rivers is going to rely on third-party auditors like Primus Labs or Scientific Certification Systems, or anyone who can meet the standards, which could be bad. Better to have some in-house expertise to make use of the audits are really create a strong food safety culture, one strong enough and backed up with date to support safety claims at retail.

Grower-shippers pay about five cents a box for the labels. Those who pass the inspections will add Eleven Rivers Growers to their existing labels. Any who fail lose the label until the causes are addressed.

For now, the label will only go as far as the pallet level — basically, a 4-inch tape around pallets.

“It’s our aim to reach the supply chain this year,” Mariscal said.

“Next year we hope to reach the final consumer, label each box and be present at the supermarkets.”

Because of that limit, the cooperative will push to keep pallet quantities together.

“We’re trying to show that pallet has been carefully monitored from crop to distribution, that it’s been well-handled all the way. Because some of the shipments will go to other suppliers, like terminal markets or brokers, we have to be sure it remains within its quality conditions.”

Commodities include a mix of tomatoes, bell peppers, chilies, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans and squash. Plans call for adding more crops over time.

Among the participating members in the nonprofit cooperative are Del Campo y Asociados; Tricar Sales; Triple H; Grupo GR; De La Costa; CAADES Sinaloa; Agroindustrias Tombell; Agricola de Gala; Agricola EPSA; and Agroexportadora del Noreste.

California cantaloupe sales crumble in wake of listeria outbreak

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Instead of picking the melons and supervising a work crew, Dora and David Elias of Mendota, California – the cantaloupe center of the world — were unemployed — laid off along with hundreds of others as the cantaloupe listeria outbreak traced to Colorado rippled across the nation.

Associated Press reports the pangs were particularly felt here in the top cantaloupe-producing state. Sales of California cantaloupes plummeted, even though their fruit was safe to eat. Farmers abandoned fields. Farmworkers lost jobs.

"We can’t sell the fruit," said Rodney Van Bebber, sales manager for Mendota-based Pappas Produce Company. "Retail stores are taking cantaloupes off the shelves, and growers are disking in their fruit because people are afraid to eat them."

Federal officials quickly isolated the contamination to Jensen Farms in the Colorado town of Holly, which recalled its cantaloupes in mid-September. The tainted cantaloupes should be out of stores now because their shelf life is about two weeks.

But farmers said the outbreak’s source mattered little. In recent weeks, Van Bebber fielded more than 300 phone calls from customers asking whether his cantaloupes were contaminated. This despite the fact that the company has put California stickers on every piece of fruit; that the California Cantaloupe Advisory Board sent letters to customers informing them that California’s crop is safe; and that supermarkets have put up signs explaining that California cantaloupes were not part of the recall.

Growers are making similar efforts in Arizona, the second-biggest cantaloupe-producing state, where the season has just begun.

Cindi Pearson of Santa Rosa Produce in Maricopa, Ariz., who started harvesting 3,000 acres of cantaloupes last week, is labeling fruit with Arizona-grown stickers. She has placed laminated

"I say we should just quit," Van Bebber said. "There is no reason for us to keep picking."

California-grown cantaloupes have never been linked to any foodborne illness outbreak, Patricio said. In fact, growers here funded research that helped refine their food safety practices. California and Arizona growers — who share a similar desert climate — have limited the use of water when growing cantaloupes by minimizing irrigation (it’s turned off several weeks before packing), field packing the fruit and no longer dunking cantaloupes in water to cool or sanitize the fruit.

We have a right to know if food will make us barf

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TV celebrity Dr. OZ says, ‘We have a right to know if our food has been genetically modified.’

I’ve been saying the same thing for 20 years – just put some boundaries on what is genetic modification, because all food is genetically modified, and figure out the best way to provide that information without imposing on others who don’t care about such lifestyle choices.

As a physician though, why isn’t Ozzie outraged about all the millions of people who get sick from the food and water they consume each year? 23 dead and 116 sick from cantaloupe is perhaps too graphic when compared to the histrionics that can be generated by hypothetical risks.

Similarly, Justin Gillis writing in the New York Times reports about self-proclaimed deep thinking going on in the food sustainability camp – which is as vague as the no-GMO camp – and that an intriguing idea is a new certification system for sustainably produced food.

“Instead of catering to a single ideological predilection, the way the organic label does now, the new label would be based on a system that awards points for public benefits and subtracts them for environmental harm. Foods produced according to the best practices would get the highest scores, or possibly the highest letter grades. If consumers adopted it, such a certification would put pressure on companies and farmers to clean up their practices.”

Consumers have the power. Oz Man, take up the cause of microbiologically safe food: we have a right to know if food will make us barf.

Rocky Ford cantaloupe growers reeling from listeria hysteria

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 It’s not hysteria when 21 people die from cantaloupe.

And the most important point for cantaloupe growers struggling with reduced sales linked to a listeria outbreak happens about halfway through a Denver Post article today:

“A federal report, expected in the next few days, may clarify the outlook, said Mike Bartolo, a Colorado State University vegetable crop specialist based in Rocky Ford. Meanwhile, CSU has been designing experiments to determine the best protocol for food safety after the Holly contamination.”

"Until we’ve got all the facts, we don’t know how to attack it," said Michael Hirakata, whose family has grown cantaloupe here for more than 80 years and supplies major buyers such as King Soopers. "I don’t want to go forward without knowing how to prevent this from happening."

In the wake of what some in Rocky Ford call "listeria hysteria," growers wrestle with how to reclaim their good name.

Experts traced the bacterial strain to a farm nearly 90 miles and two counties away in the town of Holly. But that operation labeled its cantaloupe with the Rocky Ford name — a practice that rankles some locals — and health officials initially warned the public away from any melon produced in this sweet slice of the Arkansas Valley.

Talk has begun anew about precisely defining the growing region and vigorously guarding the Rocky Ford name, whether by trying to trademark it or create a certification for its melons. Disagreement among farmers over boundaries could be an obstacle.

Grower Bill Sackett, who owns a produce stand on the east end of town, took out a paper bag and scribbled a crude map. Then he circled an area bordered by Fowler on the west and La Junta on the east — his definition of where true Rocky Ford cantaloupe originate.

"Myself, I’m going to advertise with that circle," said Sackett, who opposes any certification process that brings more government into the mix. "And I’m gonna tell people that they’re good, they’re safe and they’re nutritious."

Growers already employ practices designed to prevent foodborne illness, but the listeria outbreak could trigger a campaign to document and publicize those measures to reinforce public trust.

Good. Market food safety. And compile the data to back up any marketing claims.

Underground market in San Francisco draws authorities’ notice

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“If you have untrained vendors selling food to 1,200 people, you have a high-risk situation.”

So says Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, the director of environmental health for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

The New York Times reports for the past two years, the San Francisco Underground Market has served up haute fringe food, but on June 11, the monthly market, which now draws more than a thousand visitors, received an unwelcome serving of its own: a cease and desist order from the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

The market had positioned itself as a members-only club to circumvent the department’s retail food-safety permitting process.

The market started small but has become a kind of foodie phenomenon. The idea has been to provide an incubator for the Bay Area’s fledgling food entrepreneurs, many of them young people who said they could not afford the steep fees of a conventional farmers’ market.

The department has not received complaints of illness, Dr. Bhatia said, but given the popularity of the market — arguably no longer “underground” — it now does not qualify as a club but is a retail food establishment under state law and subject to the standard permit process.

Iso Rabins, 30, the market’s founder, said Friday that he planned to meet with the city attorney to discuss how the market might be “legitimized,” possibly by establishing a communal commercial kitchen.

Ahram Kim, 35, whose culinary pièce de résistance is pork sausage topped with kimchi, has his own theory about the crackdown. “I immediately thought: ‘Of course. The state is broke,’ ” he said.