Pundit’s Mailbag —
Gatekeepers And Risk Aversion
Our piece Consumer Studies On Spinach Reviewed … And Costco’s Proactive Approach brought a quick response from an important industry leader: The distribution issue is right on target. It is the 500 gatekeepers managing brand reputation and liability risk making the decision for consumers. Consumers are not nearly as risk averse as the gatekeepers. This […]
Pundit’s Pulse Of The Industry:
Costco’s Dale Hollingsworth
Our piece Consumer Studies On Spinach Reviewed… And Costco’s Proactive Approach included a reference to a USA Today article in which Costco publicized its insistence that suppliers product test spinach: Many retailers started reintroducing spinach in early October. Costco waited until this month. It now requires suppliers to random test spinach at the processing plant, […]
Lack Of USDA Oversight On Organics Portends Bigger Problems For
Conventional Produce
A commentary in the Northwest Indiana Times titled Blowing the whistle on sham organics focuses on the unwillingness or inability of the USDA to do very much about allegations that various products are falsely being sold as organic. Part of the issue is that various organic advocates want the organic laws to read in ways […]
Dispatch From Frankfurt —
An American Jew Goes To Germany
One of the advantages of being a Pundit is that people always want to fly you to speaking venues in their private jets or send you to their annual meeting first class. When they don’t treat you, there are still 4,000,000 frequent flyer miles to use up, so on my way to Fruit Logistica in […]
Chiquita’s Brain Drain And A Savior Perhaps
Our article Concern for Chiquita’s Future brought this thought from one of the most well-informed people on the international produce scene: In addition to the Chiquita departees you reference, Chiquita also lost Jeff Jackson (Managing Director of its Asia business) — an industry dynamo and one of the savviest produce people I know. This hemorrhaging […]
Consumer Studies On Spinach Reviewed…
And Costco’s Proactive Approach
A couple of studies are out, each designed to advance our understanding of consumer behavior related to the spinach/E. coli 0157:H7 situation. Rutgers Food Policy Institute has issued a report entitled Public Response to the Contaminated Spinach Recall of 2006, which you can read right here. The report, based on a 1,200-person telephone survey, is […]
Pundit Rewind LXVIII
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 LVIII
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 […]
Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative
Recap XL
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 […]
Berlin Bound
The Pundit is finishing this edition from the airport in Houston, where, along with Momma Pundit, we came to escort Poppa Pundit for his checkup 10 months after we did a stem-cell transplant with his identical twin brother in the hope of curing his leukemia. We wrote about the experience in the Pundit’s sister publication, […]
