Consumer Guide To
Cantaloupe Food Safety
With all this talk about cantaloupes and salmonella, we’ve been asked to provide some of our retail readers with information they can pass on to their customers regarding how to reduce the risk of such contamination on cantaloupes from any source. Fortunately food safety superstar Trevor Suslow, Extension Postharvest Specialist for the Department of Plant […]
Central American’s Warren
Speaks Out About Cantaloupe ‘Alert’
Produce is very much a relationship business, and one effect when FDA issues an “import alert” such as it did on cantaloupe produced by Agropecuaria Montelibano is that it puts these relationships under tremendous strain. One of the long established and largest importing families has a relationship with Agropecuaria Montelibano. We wanted to see how […]
Honduras Cantaloupe Grower:
Model Of Transparency
Agropecuaria Montelibano, the company that has gotten caught up in the “import alert” related to cantaloupe from Honduras, has been a model of transparency throughout this difficult situation. They have made many documents available. Some are only in Spanish and some are in English and some in both. In order to both assist those interested […]
FDA Responds To
Cantaloupe ‘Alert’ Questions
We wanted to better understand what the FDA was doing with this “import alert” that implicated cantaoupe produced by Agropecuaria Montelibano. To do this, we asked Pundit Investigator and Special Projects Editor Mira Slott to show the FDA the statement issued by the grower and try and get a reaction: Sebastian Cianci, FDA spokesperson Q: […]
How Save Mart Was
Affected By Cantaloupe ‘Alert’
We wanted to get a sense of how retailers reacted to the events surrounding the “import alert” that affected product produced by Agropecuaria Montelibano. Save Mart thought it was in the clear and then learned its fresh-cut supplier had some of the questioned melons. We asked Pundit Investigator and Special Projects Editor Mira Slott to […]
An Abuse Of Power:
A Portrait Of The FDA As Bully
What is the difference between living as a free man or woman and living under tyranny? The answer is not living without laws and regulations — that is just anarchy. The answer is living under the rule of law. People are entitled to know, in advance, what is legal and what is not legal; they […]
We Are All Affected
By Cantaloupe Issue
We’ve elected to devote this entire issue to the controversy regarding Agropecuaria Montelibano, a Honduran grower and packer, whose cantaloupes are the subject of an “import alert” announced by the FDA. We started our coverage of this issue with FDA Fumbles Again On Cantaloupe ‘Alert’, and it is no small matter to devote a whole […]
Emergency Task Force Requested
The Honduran Embassy in Washington, DC, recently hand-delivered a letter written above the signature of Hector Hernandez Amador, Secretary of Agriculture and Livestock and addressed to Michael O. Leavitt, the US Secretary of Health & Human Services. Demonstrating that this issue is spiraling way beyond a simple FDA matter, the letter was copied to various […]
Pundit’s Mailbag — Observations On
Fresh & Easy’s Competition And Britishness
Our coverage of Tesco’s journey to America has often focused on business aspects of the launch of its Fresh & Easy concept. Yet in the end, the success or failure of the concept is likely to depend, as much as anything, on consumer acceptance of its private label offerings, including fresh-cuts and prepared foods. The […]
Lessons For Everyone
From Bear Stearns
With the collapse of Bear Stearns there will be many questions to be addressed. One valuable one is for all business people to understand how such a dramatic collapse could occur. When The New York Times did a piece on March 20 entitled, At Bear Stearns, Meet the New Boss, it covered the visit of […]
