Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative Recap XXI
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 — Transitional Answers
We recently ran two letters, first, a letter from Jeff Hitchcock of Boggiatto Produce pointing out that the field implicated in the spinach/E. coli outbreak was being farmed organically and marketed as conventional due to its transitional status (farms converting from conventionally grown to organic must go through a three-year transition to make sure the […]
Pundit’s Pulse Of The Industry:
Foodbuy’s Maurice Totty
Foodservice operators are a most difficult bunch for the produce industry to get in sync with. Typically, the problem is that while retailers have dedicated produce personnel, foodservice operators tend to buy many products, more often being general food and beverage buyers. One exception to that rule is Maurice Totty of Foodbuy, the purchasing arm […]
A Little Holiday Nothingness
For those looking for an existential holiday, we offer The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook.
Fighting E. coli At The Source
One of the problems with all the industry food safety efforts is that they are fundamentally defensive. This evil E. coli 0157:H7 is out in the environment and we, as an industry, are going to put up fences, test water, test product, etc., in the hope of stopping it from getting through. We may have […]
FMI & United Trade Shows In Flux
FMI announced its new show schedule: The Food Marketing Institute (FMI) today announced a new show rotation and venue schedule beginning in 2008. The FMI Show plus MARKETECHNICS® will take place in Chicago in May of 2007 as previously scheduled, and then move to Las Vegas in 2008 to begin an alternating year rotation with […]
Pundit’s Mailbag — WGA’s Ambiguities
We published a piece entitled WGA’s Food Safety Plan Gets Attacked that detailed California State Senator Dean Florez’s attack on WGA’s proposal. The Pundit opined that WGA had basically set itself up to be attacked, as the proposal was neither what WGA had promised nor a solution that any critic of the industry will find […]
Listeria Video Available
The Association of Food and Drug Officials, an organization of regulatory officials, is making a video available at no charge called Control of Listeria Monocytogenes in Retail Establishments. Produced by the The Department of Food Science at Penn State, the program is heavy on the deli side but valuable for all perishable departments. The Pundit […]
CDC, EFORS And Holiday Hours
As usual the people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are being coy, but it seems likely that the sudden spate of produce-related foodborne illness outbreaks can be accounted for due to the summer upgrade of CDC’s Electronic Foodborne Outbreak Reporting System, or EFORS. You can see a presentation here that was done […]
Increasing Produce Consumption
At The Worksite
The Pundit extends congratulations to Curtis Granger, most recently with the Ripe ‘N Ready Tree Fruit, as he has accepted a new position as Program Manager at the Public Health Institute (PHI), Oakland, California. We asked Pundit Investigator and Special Projects Editor, Mira Slott, to talk with Curtis and the interview is very intriguing. The […]
