Pundit’s Pulse Of The Industry:
John Baillie Talks About GAPs And T&A

Among the more stalwart defenders of the grower and of the Salinas Valley is John R. Baillie of the Jack T. Baillie Co., Baillie Family Farms and Tri-County Packing. In the midst of the spinach crisis he contributed to the trade a wake up call, which we ran under the name In Defense Of Salinas. […]

Food Safety Concerns Clash
With Organic Values

Everybody is in favor of food safety — right up till it bumps into something else they value. This article, Farms May Cut Habitat Renewal Over E. coli Fears, in the San Francisco Chronicle has gotten many organic growers, who value programs that are geared toward encouraging biological diversity, questioning what will actually be required […]

Freeze Report

Obviously the freeze is bad news for many in the produce industry and we’ll be analyzing it as the situation clarifies. The key with freezes is that you can lose some crop and as long as you still have a significant amount to sell, the crop losses can be ameliorated with higher prices. This assumes […]

Pundit Rewind LVII

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 XLVII

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 […]

AgJobs Take 2

There was a Congressional Press Conference on the reintroduction of the AgJobs bill and United Fresh applauded: At a congressional press conference today, United Fresh Produce Association (United Fresh) saluted members in the House and Senate for their reintroduction of the Agricultural Job, Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act (AgJOBS), a bipartisan agricultural labor reform package […]

Wal-Mart Needs To Take
Lessons From Tiffany And HEB

After publishing our piece, Hormel, Wal-Mart And The Meaning Of Upscale, the Pundit took some flack for writing these lines: Wal-Mart doesn’t need a branding consultant. It needs a sociologist who will explain that what upscale consumers want most in their life is the one thing Wal-Mart can never deliver: To NOT be associated with […]

Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative
Recap XXVIX

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 in […]

Pundit’s Mailbag — The Tyranny Of
Economics And The Goals Of Fairtrade

Our piece reporting that a chain in the United Kingdom had announced a decision to go 100% fair-trade on bananas, entitled Sainsbury’s Commits To Fairtrade But Is It Fair For Everybody, continues to draw letters. In fact we published a letter from Marc De Naeyer, Managing Partner of TROFI in The Netherlands that pointed us […]

Oh, No! U.S. Watercress Has A
Salmonella Problem In Ireland

Uh oh, now food safety problems in the U.S. produce industry are affecting our friends in Ireland. There has been a recall that Irish authorities believe can be traced to U.S. produced watercress. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland made an announcement of a Salmonella problem: The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) today advised […]