Louisiana Restaurant Association Fighting Back Against New FDA Regulations

he Food & Drug Administration announced in October that it would place a ban on untreated oysters coming from the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana is the primary harvester and exporter of Gulf oysters, and the industry accounts for $318 million dollars each year.

Gulf oysters have been deemed a food safety threat because a particularly nasty virus, vibrio vulnificus, can infect raw oysters during summer months. About 15 people die in the United States every year as a result of consuming raw oysters infected with the virus.

The new FDA regulations will allow the sale of properly pasteurized oysters, but Louisiana restaurants and the oyster industry say pasteurization procedures will place a prohibitive cost on the industry and cause many oyster harvesters to shut down. Perhaps predictably, Louisiana’s representatives in Congress have quickly voiced their opposition to the regulation proposal, citing the threat to jobs and increased costs.

The evidence, however, leaves little doubt that regulating the Gulf oyster catch makes the public safer. California has had a ban in place on untreated Gulf oysters for six years. In that time, deaths from bad oysters went from 40 in the 10 year period leading up to the ban to zero.

Anyone in the restaurant industry knows how important food safety is, and restaurants have taken food safety very seriously for so long precisely because trust is a key element in the success of any place preparing and serving something that could potentially make customers sick.

That’s why I find the Louisiana Restaurant Association’s opposition to these new FDA regulations a little strange. Sure, no one wants to see the operating costs of a vital local industry go up, especially in an area of the country that’s seen its fair share of hard times in recent years. But how can anyone in the food service industry possibly justify opposing regulations on a type of food that has been proven to cause death in a certain segment of potential customers?

That segment is admittedly small. Yet the number of actual deaths in the spinach and tomato scares of recent years was also extremely small, and yet every restaurant and industry association reacted by pulling those items off their menus and taking whatever steps were necessary to protect consumers and avoid a food safety issue.

The Louisiana Restaurant Association’s position seems inexplicable to me.

Greg McGuire blogs about the foodservice industry at The Back Burner, which is written by the employees of Tundra Specialties, a company specializing in restaurant supplies  and food service equipment.

Concern over canned foods

The media is having a field day with ground beef and the millions of pounds that have been recalled in 2009 and the new death reported today, Consumer Reports has found that the chemical Bisphenol A, has been found in soup, juices and more. These tests raise serious questions about food safety in the United States.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will soon decide what it considers a safe level of exposure to Bisphenol A (BPA), which some studies have linked to reproductive abnormalities and a heightened risk of breast and prostate cancers, diabetes, and heart disease.

Consumer Reports’ latest tests of canned foods, including soups, juice, tuna, and green beans, have found that almost all of the 19 name-brand foods tested contain some BPA. The canned organic foods we tested did not always have lower BPA levels than nonorganic brands of similar foods analyzed. Consumer Reports even found the chemical in some products in cans that were labeled “BPA-free.”

The debate revolves around just what is a safe level of the chemical to ingest and whether it should be in contact with food.

Complete story at:

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/december-2009/food/bpa/overview/bisphenol-a-ov.htm

USDA waits a month

I watched Marley & Me for about the 10th time. When Colleen was born, the middle child called the new born “whoops”. We all know what that means.

With the case of the USDA and Fairmont Farms, the implication of “whoops” is much deeper. It can be tragic. We looked at the original press release by Fairmont Farms and the “whoops” factor could not be any clearer. Consumers are the victims not a movie family.

The tragedy of this is the sell by dates: 09/19/09 through 09/28/09. It’s now November 1, 2009. That means, a month went by. Am I missing something?

Over a half million pounds of the “possible” E-Coli laden ground beef was sold to consumers. Hey I shop in these stores. I have actually bought ground beef at BJ’s and do you think I know the sell by dates? What is wrong with USDA? Are you watching out for the hundreds of thousands of consumers that shopped in these stores?

There will always be food recalls, E.Coli, Listeria, Salmonella and mislabeling problems and US Food Safety will report them. It’s not the manufacturers, it’s the government. Don’t tell us that you are working on a safe food supply and have something like this happen. Let consumers have a break.

http://www.usfoodsafety.com/02af0278.html

Massive ground beef recall

Today’s blog would normally have been about post Halloween Candy, however, the latest food recall involving ground beef has overshadowed the food safety and Halloween blog.

Approximately 545,699 pounds of fresh ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. That’s unconcionable.

Ground beef in: Trader Joes, Shaw’s, Lancaster and Wild Harvest, Price Chopper, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Ford Brother’s, and Giant.

According to the Fairbankfarms.com website, the manufacturer of the alleged tainted ground beef, “Our current priorities are to inform the public and address their concerns. Further, we want to help them to identify and remove any of the recalled products that may be in their freezers,” said Ron Allen, CEO of Fairbank Farms”.

Instead of getting up early before your children to have that sugar rush from last night’s Halloween candy, open the freezer, check the ground beef. You’ll be glad your did.

http://www.usfoodsafety.com/02af0278.html

Marketers like Starbucks discover that simple sells

In a USA TODAY article by Bruce Horovitz, Simple is better.

This could be 2010’s most powerful marketing mantra.

If 2009’s hottest sales pitch was all about buying stuff on the cheap, 2010 marketing will increasingly stress less as more, as in fewer parts, additives or ingredients. Nowhere is it more apparent than with things we eat and drink.

This may be more marketing magic than reality. How can a product made by Kraft, Campbell’s or Dreyer’s be made to sound as simply healthy as something made fresh in your kitchen? “One way to spin this is talk about how few ingredients your product contains,” says Tom Vierhile, product analyst at researcher Datamonitor.

Consumers these days not only want to know what’s in the stuff they eat and drink — they want to know what’s not.

In a nation bedeviled by a whirlwind of food scares and mounting worries about the healthiness of a plethora of things commonly used in processed foods, folks are demanding cleaner food labels: no artificial food colorings, no chemical additives (such as MSG) and no chemical preservatives (such as BHA). If they can’t pronounce it, consumers don’t want it.

The new marketing code word being used to boast about fewer ingredients: simple.

At its simplest, simple sells.

“The food business has always been ingenious at turning any criticism into a new way to sell food to us,” says Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. The best-selling book popularized the notion of buying only foods with five or fewer ingredients. “As soon as you stress fewer ingredients, you’re implying that the food is healthy.”

From the marketers’ kitchen

Few are talking louder about simplifying ingredients than Häagen-Dazs. But its red-hot Five ice cream line did not come from a breakthrough in its new product lab. Five was born in the marketing department of parent company Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream.

The line rolled out in March with seven flavors. The marketing campaign included an online chat asking folks about the five most essential things they want to do in their lives. The response was so strong that it crashed the servers at Dreyer’s within two hours.

Starbucks. Five years ago, consumers started asking Starbucks for healthier foods. Its banana bread, for example, had been made with 15 ingredients. But food scientists have slimmed that to 10. One way: Stop using banana flavoring.

When the revamped food line was rolled out earlier this year, baristas handed out samples of the new banana bread along with index cards listing the ingredients.

•Kraft. Triscuit cracker brand has embraced the less-is-more trend. What’s in the box: wheat, salt and oil. This year, it began replacing palm oil with healthier soybean oil. And Triscuit marketing and labeling spell out the specific whole-grain wheat: soft white winter wheat.

•Campbell. Select Harvest line limits the number of ingredients — and spells out what each one is. Maltodextrin is found in soups in both its Chunky and Select Harvest lines. For Select Harvest, Campbell provides a simple description of what it is: a carbohydrate from potato or corn starch. It provides no such explanation on Chunky soups.

•Beech-Nut. When Beech-Nut rolled out the Let’s Grow toddler foods late last year, it put a “No Junk” promise on the container and in its marketing. That means no added sugars, modified starches or fillers. “We don’t put in any ingredients that moms might not know what they mean,” he says.

complete article at:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-10-27-marketers-simple-sells_N.htm