A Special Note To Our Non-Produce Readers
The readership of the Pundit is broad and includes many executives in all perishable areas. However, because of the urgency of the food safety crisis in spinach, we’ve focused our attention there the last few days. Though perhaps not directly relevant to readers in different areas, one of the purposes of the Pundit is to […]
Marketing Nightmare
I often get phone calls from consumers looking for nutritional advice related to specific illnesses. It’s not uncommon for someone to start a conversation by explaining that some family member has cancer and they want advice on which produce items will help their recovery. I always recommend these people talk to their doctors. But in […]
Greenhouse Opportunity
Greenhouse growing has traditionally been used to produce products when local products were unavailable. More recently greenhouse-grown product has been a higher quality product due to the controlled growing conditions in a greenhouse. Thus these products often get premium prices. The E. coli incident on spinach is raising public awareness of the danger of environmental […]
Is FDA’s Concern Now An Obsession?
The spinach recall continues to rock the industry. We dealt with the implications of the recall for fresh-cuts here, what it might mean for organic farming here and came up with ten points regarding the implications of the recall here. Yet there is more. Ever since the Alar imbroglio of 1989, the industry has been […]
Pundit Mailbag:
United Responds
The Pundit wrote about the launch of the new United Fresh Produce Association here, and the industry almost immediately became engulfed in the spinach E. coli outbreak. Tom Stenzel, President and CEO of the new United, stole a few minutes to send the Pundit a note: Thanks for your kind words about the launch of […]
Fit To Be Tied
Some people have simply no sense of decency. Many years ago, Procter & Gamble launched a product called Fit, which is basically a produce wash. It was never very popular and most produce departments refused to stock it because the produce directors thought that the very presence of such a product in the department raised […]
Organic Dodges A Bullet
Natural Selection Foods issued another statement regarding the E. coli outbreak in bagged spinach: Based on our work with the US Food & Drug Administration and the California Department of Health Services, we have confirmed that no organic products of any kind, including Earthbound Farm spinach or other products, have been linked to this outbreak […]
Ramifications And Reflections
On The Spinach Recall
Some of the worst news the industry could hope to have has come from the statement by the FDA that, although the FDA had not identified the bacteria in any of the products it traced, patient reports led it to announce that the outbreak had been tracked down to Natural Selection Foods. This follows the […]
Who Has Marketing Fortitude?
We’ve written a lot about the issue of licensing cartoon characters to promote produce. We dealt with the issue here, here and here. Now if the Disney Garden project had a bagged spinach, there is a decent chance it would have been bagged by Natural Selection Foods, which I’m sure would meet the toughest of […]
A Look At Longevity
A new study out of Harvard raises some interesting issues about longevity and the role of diet in life expectancy: Leading the nation in longevity are Asian-American women who live in Bergen County, New Jersey, and typically reach their 91st birthdays…On the opposite extreme are American-Indian men in swaths of South Dakota, who die around […]
