Safe food shouldn't just be for the affluent - and they're sorta clueless when it comes to food that makes them barf
Market research sucks. With food, people vote at the checkout counter with their wallets. Sitting at home, talking to some annoying survey person who only calls when dinner is about to be served reveals … nothing, except the potential buying patterns of pissed off shoppers, wondering why they can’t just eat dinner without the phone ringing.
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A new national survey of more affluent consumers from strategic marketing communications firm Context Marketing, “Beyond Organic -- How Evolving Consumer Concerns Influence Food Purchases,” has found that most respondents are highly concerned about the safety of the food they buy and would pay more for food they believe to be safer or healthier.
The research also found that assurances about what a food doesn’t contain, such as pesticides or antibiotics, matter a great deal to these consumers, along with ethical claims that reinforce quality and safety perceptions. …
While respondents confirmed that low price is a major influence on most food purchases, 60 percent said they would pay up to 10 percent more for food they think is healthier, safer or produced according to higher ethical standards, and 14 percent said they would pay a premium greater than 10 percent.
But right now, all that is available at retail is products that hint at enhanced microbial food safety and offer ... nothing.
Market microbial food safety so consumers can choose.
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Faith-based food safety? Market microbial food safety directly at retail so consumers can choose
Most food purchases are based on faith. That’s why an extensive series of rules, regulations and punishments emerged beginning in 12th century Mediterranean areas.
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Faith-based food safety systems are prevalent from the farmer’s market to the supermarket, especially in the produce section. And almost anything can, and is, claimed on food labels – except microbial food safety.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced they are going to examine the growing number of nutrition claims found on the front of food packages after complaints the labels promote health fairytales.
In the U.K., the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has encouraged diners to boycott restaurants that cannot answer questions about the origin of their food.
British chefs Raymond Blanc, Peter Gordon, Martin Lam, Paul Merrett and Antony Worrall-Thompson issued a joint statement saying:
“The British public need to stop being so reticent in restaurants and start asking where their food comes from. It’s your right to know the origin of the food you are served and what types of farms are being used - and the mark of a good restaurant is one that is proud to tell you.”
In response to this news Freedom Food has launched a new long-term campaign called ‘Simply Ask’ which aims to get people asking about food provenance when eating out. This is in a bid to encourage restaurants, pubs and cafes to start sourcing products from higher welfare farms such as Freedom Food, free-range or organic.
Americans are questioning nutrition claims, Brits are questioning allegedly animal-friendly sources of food, maybe there’s room to ask for microbiologically safe food – the stuff that sickens up to 30 per cent of all people everywhere every year (so says the World health Organization).
Lots of companies and retailers are taking baby steps in the direction of empowering consumers to hold producers accountable, but lots aren’t.
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Maple Leaf Foods, whose listeria-laden cold-cuts killed 22 Canadians last year, is continuing on its bad Journey to Food Safety Leadership by announcing today that, “Industry and government come together to make food safer for Canadians.”
Invoking the two groups shoppers distrust the most – industry and government – and proclaiming they are working together to better things may not be the best communication strategy to build trust and confidence.
Dr. Randall Huffman, Chief Food Safety Officer for Maple Leaf Foods, stated,
"The Canadian food industry is united that food safety not be used as a competitive advantage. Every member at every step in the production process is a steward of food safety. This spirit of cooperation heralds a new beginning for our industry, and together we will make Canada the gold standard for food safety. This symposium is the first in a series to ensure we share experiences and knowledge, and gain insights into emerging risks, technology advances and cutting edge science that can deliver safer food for Canadians."
That’s nice. Computer companies share technology all the time but that doesn’t stop them from marketing their individual technological advantages.
Stop pandering. Companies that are serious about food safety will go beyond the trust-me approach of faith-based food safety systems and provide public access to food safety test results, provide warnings to populations at risk, and market food safety at retail, to enhance the food safety culture back at the producer or processor level, and to build consumer confidence. May even make money.
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Obama wants White House farmers market: buy liability insurance, try not to make people barf
U.S. President Obama said on Thursday that he and the First Lady are looking into setting up a farmers market just outside the White House, which might sell food from the White House garden or from local farmers.
The President said it could give the city of Washington, D.C., “more access to good, fresh food, but it also is this enormous potential revenue-maker for local farmers in the area.”
Obama mentioned the idea while answering a citizen question at a health-care forum.
I’d ask the same questions I’d ask any other purveyor of fresh produce: how often is your water tested and what are the results? What soil amendments are used? And what is the sanitation and handwashing program for the employees and anyone else who may have handled the produce?
Oregon: Live dangerously with dogs; lose a sandwich
Oregon seems like a lovely place. Never been, although the sense of dopiness in the state has apparently gotten so bad that the state Department of Agriculture has to allocate resources to a public awareness campaign to remind Oregonians it's illegal for dogs to enter grocery stores - unless it's a service dog.
Vance Bybee, administrator of the agency's Food Safety Division, told the Charleston Daily Mail,
"There's a trend, a growing trend, for people to treat their pets like a member of the family, but they forget we still have to draw the line between our furry children and those without paws.”
Is he talking about my hairy baby? Is he discriminating against children with paws? This is probably the worst attempt at being cute in a quote -- ever.
"Interestingly enough, we get more complaints in Bend and in the Pearl District of Portland where people are more affluent and have the opportunity to pamper their pets and feel this pet is a part of my family so I am entitled to do with it what I like."
Bybee said the division gets more than 100 complaints a year about dogs doing inappropriate things in grocery stores, from urinating in the aisles to sniffing and licking food. The Portland Farmers Market banned dogs earlier this year because vendors and shoppers complained about sanitation, safety and crowding. One vendor lost a sandwich to a dog, and one customer who got tangled in a leash had to be taken to the hospital.
Stickers source watermelons to California farm
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that at a farm in Manteca, in San Joaquin County, workers smack labels onto watermelons freshly cut from the vine, each sticker bearing a unique string of letters and numbers that identifies where they were harvested.
Ryan Van Groningen of Van Groningen & Sons Farms, which sells watermelons under the Yosemite Fresh brand, said,
"With food safety as big as it is, we can give each watermelon its own code so a consumer can check on the Internet to see where it is grown.”
This new code, called the HarvestMark, is being developed by the Redwood City startup YottaMark Inc. at a time when Congress is considering food-safety legislation that could make some type of tracking system mandatory.
In advance of any legal mandate, a few growers have started putting HarvestMark codes on products like plastic-packaged grapes and strawberries, as well as watermelons.
The idea is to enable a consumer to type the 16-digit tracking code into a locator field at HarvestMark.com to learn where the product was grown. Depending on the grower's records and what the farm chooses to reveal, the system could detail the date and part of the field where the product originated.
Great idea.
A decade ago, I advised the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers – whose cluster tomatoes still dominate supermarket shelves in Florida in the middle of summer – to do something similar, to market their food safety efforts directly to the concerned consumer.
For other produce producers, forget government babysitters and the non-niceties of offending other growers … growers who maybe aren’t so good at food safety.
Go further. Put a url on the sticker so concerned shoppers can check out a web site with video, not just about where a commodity was grown, but about food safety standards, and real-time test results for water quality and product sampling.
And then market it.
How to greenwash food packaging; market food safety instead
Eat Me Daily is fast becoming one of my go-to sites. They write today:
This illustration by Lunchbreath is basically a checklist for corporate greenwashing: Earth tones, sans serif type, unbleached paper, and emotional messaging are essential components of the deceptive marketing techniques employed by corporations that rebrand their products.
We liked the customer benefit: "Be selfish while appearing progressive."
Market food safety instead. People are interested in not barfing.
Can regulators regulate and promote? Safe food sells
I cringe when pompous professorial types begin sentences with, “Clearly …”
It happens a lot.
Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard a variation of, “Clearly, government agencies can’t regulate and promote food at the same time.” I was on National Public Radio in Maryland a few weeks ago and the statement was repeated mantra-like by both the host and some activist dude.
Yesterday, it was Sylvain Charlebois, a business professor at the University of Regina, telling Canadian parliamentarians they should establish an independent food safety agency reporting directly to Parliament because the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is failing consumers because of its “dual mandate.”
That wasn’t so clear to Ronald Doering (right) who served as the CFIA's president from 1997 to 2002 and practically designed the agency. He called Charlebois's proposal to "hive off food safety" to a body reporting to Parliament instead of to a minister, “silly.”
"The principle consensus all around was if you're going to reorganize how you're going to do food safety, animal heath and plant protection, you've got to make sure you've got accountability right. All parties agreed that we needed to have the agency report directly to a minister in the traditional way, and there could be no doubt that the minister the agency reported to would be accountable for its work."
Sure, CFIA has problems -- like staff figuring out how to subscribe to FSnet. About 400 of them got deleted last week because of repeated error messages due to changes in e-mail addresses. About 250 figured out how to resubscribe; the other 150 decided to personally e-mail and demand I play secretary. Veterinarians with entitlement issues?
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Back to the issue. I’ve always thought it’s easier to market safe food and never had much time for the armchair conspiracy theorists.
Doering also said it's "simplistic" to argue the CFIA's dual mandate presents a problem for consumers. Rather, he said Canadians are well-served by putting "the whole food chain in a single enforcement agency, so the CFIA is responsible for seeds, feed, fertilizers, all plant health, all animal health, all food, all commodities because they are all connected."
"The Canadian food, animal health and plant regulatory system is admired around the world. The idea we can export to a 100 countries food, animal or plants without inspection has to say something about the credibility of the regulatory agency."
Selling home-baking banned in Urbana
It’s springtime so bring on variable interpretation of health code rules, the plight of home bakers and outraged local politicians.
"I will not stay silent. Most people who go to the farmers' market know it's not made in a commercial-grade kitchen."
That’s Alderwoman Heather Stevenson, R-Ward 6, of Urbana, Illinois, criticizing a new policy banning the sales of home-baked goods, at Monday's city council meeting.
Jim Roberts, director of environmental health for the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District said the district has long allowed the sale of many home-baked goods at farmers' market but after he attended a January panel discussion about farmers' markets sponsored by the University of Illinois Extension Service and The Land Connection, and after checking with other area health departments, he felt compelled to revisit the issue.
He said, selling baked goods commercially on a weekly basis for several months a year is "a business," and is not allowed under the law unless the baked goods are cooked in a certified kitchen with a permit from the health department.
Roberts made the mistake of thinking, and then publicly sharing his thoughts.
My understanding is that public health types are actively discouraged from such nefarious activities, otherwise they face the wrath of local politicians.
We shared our thoughts about the necessity of health umpires here a couple of years ago.
Maple Lodge to market food safety on deli meats; will Maple Leaf follow?
Maple Lodge Farms is Canada's largest independent chicken processor and I’ve been to the slaughter plant in Brampton, Ontario. With all the Maple Leaf listeria stuff over the past eight months, Maple Lodge has been sorta quiet.
Until today.
Maple Lodge chief executive officer Michael Burrows unveiled a new high-pressure method of killing listeria and other bacteria in sliced luncheon meats after the package is sealed. The process applies water under extremely high pressure to the packaged product, has no adverse impact on the product itself, and has been approved by Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
So Maple Leaf, using that newfangled blogging technology, responded by saying Maple Leaf Foods was an early adopter of Ultra High Pressure (UHP) technology in Canada and began using it in Maple Leaf Simply Fresh entree products when they were introduced more than two years ago, in a bunch of other products, and will look at using it in deli meat if it can provide added food safety assurance to consumers.
Maple Leaf, seriously, you need better writers.
But this is what I like about the Maple Lodge approach:
They came out and said internal research showed consumer demand for higher levels of food safety has risen sharply in the past year, and that consumers would be willing to pay a premium of 1-2 cents per 100 grams of product to get it.
Maybe, consumers will say anything on a survey but vote with their money at checkout.
But Maple Lodge is going to label the stuff with a" SafeSure" sticker and market food safety at retail.
Good for them. Rather than lecturing consumers, let them choose. At checkout.
Farmers markets on campus - where's the food safety?
University campuses are often the first mainstream pressure point to be hit with food fads. So it’s no surprise the Los Angeles Times reports this morning that a growing number of colleges are finding that campus farmers markets are a great fit, tapping into students' interest in sustaining the planet with an appealing combination of food, music and lots of people hanging out.
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The University of Southern California held its first market in February 2008, the result of meetings between students and university officials that began in fall 2007.
Scott Shuttleworth, the university's director of hospitality said that having at least one farmer at the market was important to give shoppers a chance to talk with someone about "eco-friendly agriculture and organic and natural farming practices."
I’m not sure at what point only local, natural types who hang out at farmers markets cornered the language on “sustaining the planet” but it happened a while ago – and without discussion. As usual, what was lacking from the coverage was any discussion of microbial food safety standards; even suggesting such basics can bring the wrath of a tyrannical religion.
The author of the blog, Conkey’s Tavern, who’s a fan of local, as am I, agreed the other day with the idea of data: water quality results, data on soil amendments, evidence of compliance with handwashing and safe handling.
It isn’t about local, small or big. It’s about what will make folks barf. And that requires control of dangerous microorganisms, regardless of politics.
Times food safety editorial is nutty
An editorial in Tuesday’s N.Y. Times about the now bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America and its Salmonella shitfest is long on outrage but short on imagination.
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“While most successful food producers are far more diligent — big name-brand peanut butter is considered safe, for example — American consumers have faced far too many food-supply emergencies in the last few years.”
Is ConAgra a big food company? Wasn’t Peter Pan peanut butter the source of a huge Samonella outbreak in 2007?
“Congress needs to find more money for inspectors, especially at the Food and Drug Administration.”
Maybe, but lots of federal and state inspectors, along with the best and brightest the Ponzi scheme of food safety auditing had to offer all seemed to miss the problems at PCA. If someone wants to break the law and ship Salmonella-contaminated product, it’s going to happen.
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“President Obama promised during the campaign to create a government that does a better job of protecting the American consumer. The nation’s vulnerable food supply is a healthy place to start.”
Government has a role. But nowhere did the Times editorial mention the power of consumer choice that would be unleashed if food producers would truthfully market their microbial food safety programs, coupled with behavioral-based food safety systems that foster food safety culture from farm-to-fork. The best producers and processors will go far beyond the lowest common denominator of government and should be rewarded in the marketplace.
No incentive for a culture of food safety?
In an op-ed published on Marler Blog today titled, The market for peanuts: Why food in the U.S. may never be safe, Denis W. Stearns seemed to list three reasons why there is little economic incentive for producers to make food that is safer than that of any other producer.
Stearns argued that the culture pervading Peanut Corporation of America was a perfect example of those ideas at work.
1. To begin with, there is no such thing as a “free” market for food…
Consumers want safe food, but cannot tell if a food is hazard-free before purchase and therefore cannot discriminately buy only safe brands.
Stearns referred to a New York Times article that described “the array of poor work conditions and safety flaws” hidden behind the plant’s walls that was not perceived in its products until hundreds were sickened.
2. [R]egulations can impose a predictable cost that companies can meet, but need not exceed.
An incident/outbreak linked to one producer can turn consumers off the entire product-category, regardless of how far above and beyond regulations unassociated producers go to ensure safety.
In the same vein, George Akerlof was quoted as saying “there is an incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group…rather than to the individual seller.”
3. Finally, there is the important issue of traceability—or, in the case of the United States, the stunning lack of it.
If it is not likely that an incident/outbreak will be traced back to the producer responsible, the possibility of making a profit from a contaminated food may be greater than the chance they’ll get caught.
Stearns cited e-mails by Peanut Corp. president Stewart Parnell in which he directed that contaminated produce be shipped: "I go thru this about once a week. I will hold my breath .... again."
Stearns closed with this:
[A]t this point, after outbreak after outbreak after outbreak, is it possible that finally, once and for all, the case for the effective regulation of the food industry has been incontestably made?
I can only hope so.
Because until the market for peanuts—and other food—is made to work for the benefit of the public health, the big profits will continue to go to the companies that cheat, cut corners, and do not care.
Chinese poop turns heads in Lawrence (Kansas)
Bryan Severns, a new food science student at Kansas State and a former chef, writes about the discussion prompted by his Chinese language Don’t Eat Poop shirt, and general hygiene at the Lawrence market:
On a beautiful sunny Saturday in Lawrence, the handwashing word was spread from the Farmers market, through the fabric store, to the Merc. The combination of Chinese characters and the Don’t Eat Poop web address were enough to spark conversations in food safety and educational techniques. The most common initial reaction is wide eyed disbelief that anyone would say that in public, but upon further explanation most people have stories of their own to relate, and the conversation is off and rolling.
In related news, it was nice to see a complete handwashing station set up at the Farmer’s Market. Actually saw it in action, very cool. I’m a total supporter of local producer markets, but quite often the sanitation is left up to individual participants, and most seem to barely get their product out on display, let alone take care of the clean up details. Big points to the Market Manager and city of Lawrence.
On a more general note, after spending three weeks and 3000 miles to get to KSU from Vermont, my wife and I are glad to be here and have a great time learning about the area. Thanks to all who have been friendly and helpful, Manhattan is a very welcoming city.
That’s me with the beard visiting our son at Coast Guard Station Fire Island, New York (below).
Mayra goes to the Idaho market, and finds food is local, not safer
I read the results of a poll published by the Associated Press, concluding that half of Americans are changing their buying behavior because of the most recent salmonella outbreak.
I was surprised at the market when all the people who I managed to grab for a short interview (shoppers busy shopping) replied they weren’t afraid of getting sick from the food they were buying.But they weren’t feeling completely safe either.
I guess getting diarrhea once in a while is just part of life. And things can get out of control for farmers, large and small, unless you are controlling, of course.
“I’m buying tomatoes now,” she said. “Nothing is safe unless it comes from your own backyard and you have full control and knowledge over how you grow the produce.”
One woman even said that the salmonella outbreak was simply fake. She understood it as some sort of scam of the government to get people to believe in something to act a certain way and that it’s destroying people’s lives.
Wow.
Didn’t quote her in my article.
But this was the general reaction I got:
“Everything is locally grown and I want to support local, including a friend who works at a farm,” she said. “I don’t think it’s safer though.”
I agree with the conclusion of this shopper:
“With rising oil prices, people have been concerned about other things too,” he said. “They are more concerned about sustainability and the environment, and they think coming to the market supports the cause.”
Mayra Rivarola is a journalism student at Kansas State University hoping to graduate in 2010 when she plans to return to her native Paraguay. She loves traveling, cooking, and watching TV commercials. Mayra is also addicted to the Internet and is eternally thankful for Google.
