Happy To Meat You
Apparently this human face on the pork-based luncheon meat has been manufactured and sold in the UK for well over a decade. We wrote about Tesco opening up in America here and here. The British are always welcome, but, please, leave your lunch meat home.
Hannaford Looks To The Stars
Hannaford has launched an exceedingly ambitious program to rank the nutritional merit of almost the whole supermarket with a one-star, two-star or three-star system. It is a good, better, best program and, implicitly, leaves a lot of products at zero stars. It will probably help a lot of people as it takes random information about […]
Extortion By Government
Price Chopper paid a $10,000 fine to make a lawsuit from the Attorney General of Vermont go away. The gist of the matter was that the attorney general in what some of us affectionately call The People’s Republic of Vermont sued the Golub Corporation, the parent company of Price Chopper supermarkets alleging fraud because it […]
Wal-Mart Distractions
When Wal-Mart announced that it was going to retool its stores over the next two years to focus on six target groups — Hispanics, African Americans, “empty-nesters/boomers,” affluent, suburban and rural shoppers — it was popularly portrayed as an end to Wal-Mart’s cookie-cutter format. Yet the whole thing is really a quandary. First, although the […]
Reflecting On The Bigger Issues
It is a common thing for industry institutions to be so focused on issues of specific importance to the trade that they neglect the great issues of our time. It will little matter what immigration bill we pass, what we do with the minimum wage or how earnestly we work to increase consumption of healthy […]
Quicksand Of Unproven Assumptions
The 10th International Congress on Obesity, being held in Sydney, Australia, has drawn 2,000 academics and health professionals but has fallen into public-policy wishful-thinking, instead of actual science-based behavior. They have gathered many “experts” around the world in urging as the headline in the Cape Times says in a “Call for global ban on junk […]
Packinghouse Visits And Dinner Conversations
When I’m back in the US, I’ll write up a lot more about the specific experiences I’ve had in South Africa, especially my visits with many retailers, wholesale markets, exporters and packers. But as I prepare to leave, I wanted to mention two US brands I had occasion to visit yesterday. Went to visit a […]
The Perishable Pundit Visits South Africa
Dispatch IX: Wrong Ways To Reduce Food Prices
The Cape Times of Wednesday, September 6, 2006, reports that in South Africa a quarterly review of food prices presented before the national assembly’s agricultural affairs committee by the National Agricultural Marketing Council (NAMC) found that: Rural people still pay more for food than those in urban areas, although most of South Africa’s food products […]
Words of Appreciation
With this entry, the Pundit prepares to jet back to the States with a brief stop in London, and as he climbs on the plane it is with the sweet satisfaction that we have concluded the fifth week of publication. We visited distant Africa and gained new insight and new friends while maintaining a growing […]
Tragedy Befalls Nucci Family Again
How much sadness should one family be asked to endure? That is the only thought in my mind as I learned that Don Nucci, co-owner and co-chairman of Mann Packing, passed away on September 4. He had just turned 70 in August. He had been enjoying Labor Day vacation, kayaking in Oregon. According to family […]
