Tim Vaux To Leave DuPont
Timothy R. Vaux is a man whose impact on the produce industry is wildly underestimated. He has been the advocate for the produce trade at DuPont and since 1995 he has represented DuPont as sole sponsor of the Produce Industry Leadership Program in its relations with United, which has managed the program. The program has […]
Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative
Recap XLIV
There is an ad hoc group that started it all. The National Restaurant Association has its group working on a program and the Food Marketing Institute held a conference. All these buyer-led initiatives can get confusing, so to assist the trade in keeping track of them all, we are publishing this recap of coverage all […]
Science: As Tough As You Like It
The Pundit had an opportunity to sit down with a couple of key players in the Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative, and we were challenged on our repeated suggestion — see here, here and here — that the standards Fresh Express detailed in a USA Today article should be adopted as minimum standards for the ready-to-eat […]
WGA’s Secret Science Panel
It is fair to say that the very purpose of the California Marketing Agreement that will cover spinach, lettuce and other leafy greens is to build regulatory and consumer confidence. In order to do that, we need not only a defensible procedure — be it regulation by government, private entities or some other alternative — […]
Heads Up — PR Problems For Produce
The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric is running a series called What’s on the Menu. As CBS puts it: “… the three-part series will take a hard look at the issues surrounding food safety and what is — and is not — being done to protect us from what we eat. It’s an issue […]
Pundit Rewind LXVXII
The Pundit originally ran the Pundit Rewind on September 21, 2006. We continuously update it in order to keep everyone organized with respect to reference material on this subject; we have updated it with new items and run it again today. Spinach Crisis Summary With so much having been written in so short a time, […]
Botulism And Carrot Juice Summary LVXII
We’ve been asked to make available in one place our coverage of the recall by Wm. Bolthouse Farms of certain 100% carrot juice products and the broader implications of this issue for food safety. This piece is updated regularly and will be re-run to include new coverage of this outbreak and issue. We initiated our […]
Pundit’s Mailbag — Exporter Headaches
We received this letter from a San Francisco-based exporter: In or around July 2006 the marine terminal operators at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles in California created Pier Pass. It was created to try to reduce container traffic during peak hours of the day. As a small exporter of perishable produce mainly […]
Fresh Express Declines To Sign
California Marketing Agreement
The big question regarding the California Marketing Agreement for spinach, lettuce and leafy greens has been whether Fresh Express would elect to sign the agreement. As the biggest player in the field and the one with the best reputation for its food safety program, its signature to the agreement would certainly have helped solve a […]
Bigger Than You Think
Another distinction between Fruit Logistica and US events is the way audience figures are reported. In Berlin, the fair is strictly prohibited from reporting anyone who works for an exhibiting company as an attendee. This is somewhat unfair since many exhibitors, such as fresh-cut processors, can both be big vendors — say of packaged salads […]
