Tesco Takes Heat For
Not Supporting Underserved
Vendor reports are that sales at the newly opened Fresh & Easy stores are brisk with the chain easily exceeding its plans to sell twice per square foot what a conventional supermarket does. The same vendors, though, believe the initial price points are not sustainable and wonder if “grand opening specials” aren’t driving a lot […]
Cutting Through The Agendas:
What’s A Buyer To Do?
Our pieces on the Food Safety Leadership Council, which you can read here, here and here, brought to the fore the issue of the role of buyers in establishing food safety standards, which we earlier dealt with rather extensively as a result of the Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative — launched in October of 2006 — […]
Pundit’s Mailbag — Welcome To The
World Of Retail-Imposed Standards
Following our two Pundits on the controversy between WGA and the Food Safety Leadership Council, which you can read here and here, we heard from several of our friends in the U.K. Their take was that of empathy for the growers, as they have already been through this, as one long time British retailer expressed: […]
Back Channel Discussions
On The Food Safety Leadership Council
As our initial pieces and follow-up articles pointed out, the method of Food Safety Leadership Council members trying to enforce their standards upon growers has caused quite a controversy. Back channel communication with a lot of different parties has led to a few points: Legal is behind a lot of this. How can companies minimize […]
Buyer Commitment To Higher Standards
Means Willingness To Pay More
When WGA issued its letter to Publix, we questioned the applicability of some its concerns: WGA seems to be missing the important point that Publix is a company free to make its own procurement policies. Even its letter to Publix, in point ten (10), seems to imply that WGA is missing this key point: 10) […]
Consensus From Unknown Experts Leaves Cause To Err
On Side Of Caution
In the more moderate joint produce association letter sent to Walt Disney World Co., there was a point made that spoke to how food safety metrics ought to be designed when we have imperfect knowledge: “…some of the recommendations in your document are inherently based on opinion and judgment where science is insufficient, such as […]
WGA’s Primal Scream…
And Dirty Glasses
The letter that Western Growers Association wrote to Publix in response to its letter to produce suppliers insisting on adherence to new food safety standards of the Food Safety Leadership Council is best understood as a primal scream — an outpouring of the bitterness and resentment that growers feel toward big buyers. After we ran […]
Negotiation Delegation Needed
We are a little concerned that all these letters may have poisoned the water too much for negotiations to proceed smoothly. The goal has to be to get the technical people talking, and to make that happen the industry should consider appointing a negotiating delegation, a team of industry eminences who could hopefully mediate this […]
Are Buyers Willing To Pay More And Partner With Vendors For Food Safety?
We closed our initial piece on the subject of WGA’s response to the Food Safety Leadership Council by pointing out the need to lower the emotion level: One thing is sure: Buyers and sellers have to live together, so some civility in our discussions is essential for the long term success and prosperity of the […]
Letters Bring Broader Issues To Surface
The new joint produce association letter to the Food Safety Leadership Council (FSLC) is much better than the one sent by WGA, yet we confess that we suspect all this letter-writing is counterproductive. Letters tend to freeze positions in place and limit the freedom of negotiation. They create public records and put people on the […]
