Is that a Vegemite or an iSnack 2.0 sandwich, or are you just happy to see me?
In one of the most bizarre marketing decisions – ever, even for Australia – Kraft Foods decided to name its second generation Vegemite the iSnack 2.0.
I first heard the term Vegemite near the beginning of the worst decade of music ever, in the 1981 song, Down Under, by Men at Work.
Vegemite is made from leftover brewers' yeast extract, a by-product of beer manufacturing, and various vegetable and spice additives. The taste may be described as salty, slightly bitter, and malty - somewhat similar to the taste of beef bouillon. The texture is smooth and sticky, much like peanut butter.
Helen Razer, a Melbourne writer, says in today’s (tomorrow’s) The Age, that the chief element in Vegemite's new product is cream cheese. A secondary ingredient appears to be abject failure. No one likes the name of this new yeast product, except at least six Harvard MBAs at Kraft Foods who adore it.
The winning name was announced during the telecast of the AFL grand final. In an effort ''to align the new product with a younger market - and the 'cool' credentials of Apple's iPod and iPhone'' Kraft chose iSnack 2.0 from a field of 48,000.
This raises many questions. Chief among them is how very terrible were the other 47,999 competition submissions that Kraft was left with iSnack 2.0?
Razer says the label is every bit as hip as a polka convention and every bit as convincingly ''now'' as parachute pants.
Sounds like the wardrobe for a 1981 video shoot.
Razer also says, on Monday, the global noticeboard Twitter was jammed with disgust. Comments that included ''I said do you speaka my language? She just smiled and gave me an iSnack 2.0 sandwich'' and ''What's the matter, was the name Crap Paste already trademarked?''
Salmonella in pistachios: He Said, She Said
It’s on, bitches.
After a production manager for Setton Pistachio's sister company in New York said yesterday Kraft Foods did not tell Setton until recently that they had detected salmonella-tainted pistachios last year, Kraft offered a timeline of Salmonella-positive events. Kraft spokeswoman Susan Davison said,
Workers at one of Kraft's manufacturers in Illinois turned up a contaminated batch of fruits and nuts in December 2007. Then, in September of last year, another positive sample appeared.
Only after thousands of tests could the company pinpoint the source for the second positive test as California-based Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, Inc. … Kraft finally determined pistachios caused last year's problem in March, when their manufacturer in Illinois detected salmonella for the third time - this time in the nuts, the only common ingredient between the second and third batch of trail mix. Kraft has not traced the source for the first positive salmonella test in 2007.
"If we did detect salmonella, of course we would never ship our products. We conducted extensive testing of all our food, and we were just unable to zero in until March that pistachios were the root cause."
Setton Pistachio then retracted the production manager’s statement.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration sent out a letter to the pistachio industry reminding nut processors to follow good manufacturing practices to protect consumers, something food safety experts called welcome guidance.
Oh, and before it was an Ashley Tisdale song, He Said She Said was a bad 1991 romantic comedy about competing newspaper advice columnists. They’d be blogging for free today.
Kraft unit recalls Salmonella-tainted trail mix; it's the pistachios
Back to Nature Foods Co., a Wisconsin firm owned by Kraft Foods Inc., issued a nationwide recall Wednesday on its Nantucket Blend trail mix because some of the pistachio nuts tested positive for Salmonella.
And the pistachios came from a supplier to the Georgia Nut Company, which found the Salmonella through its own testing.
The press release from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said,
This possible contamination is not connected with the recent outbreak associated with peanuts or peanut butter and no cases of Salmonellosis have been reported in connection with the recall.
Back to Nature Foods products are sold in Chicago area Dominick’s, Jewel, Target, Wal-mart, Whole Foods, Wild Oats, Hy-Vee, Kroger, Meijer and Woodman’s stores, as well as at military commissaries.
Casey did a quick search and found there have been no Salmonella outbreaks or reported positives associated with pistachios, although 2006 Good Agricultural Practice documents suggest limiting exposure of pistachios to irrigation water and carefully handling on-farm manure because of the possibility of microbial contaminants. It appears there's a widespread belief that the hull protects the edible parts, and drying and roasting further mitigate risks of contamination, although the GAP document and research on other nuts has concluded such assumptions remain unverified.
