Food Companies

Borden Inc., New York, said it will buy Prince Co., a Lowell, Mass., maker of pasta and Italian food sauces, and three smaller food concerns for a total of $180 million. The three other companies are Steero Bouillon of Jersey City, N.J., a producer of cubed and instant bouillon; Blue Channel Inc. of Beaufort, S.C., which markets canned crab meat, and DeJean Packing Inc., which sells canned shrimp products.

In addition to the 3,000 deaths it causes each year, contaminated food is very expensive. The cost of food poisoning in this country comes to $14 billion a year, according to a July 2012 study published in the Journal of Food Protection, including the medical expenses of the 128,000 who are hospitalized annually. That figure does not include the millions of dollars that each food recall costs the company involved, the legal expenses from victims' lawsuits or losses incurred by other companies when consumers hear, for example, about contaminated cantaloupes and then avoid all cantaloupes, including those that are perfectly safe.

Some food for thought the next time you're in a supermarket: Those items in your basket are survivors in a ferocious battle roiling the food industry. Just ask Joe Weller. As chief executive of Nestle USA, the domestic arm of the Swiss food colossus, Weller wages a daily fight for supermarket shelf space with the other giant providers of branded foods, including Procter & Gamble Co., H.J. Heinz Co. and RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp.

A grill man turned chief executive at McDonald's, Fred L. Turner oversaw an aggressive expansion of the company beginning in the 1970s that turned it into a corporate giant. When he began reshaping the restaurants in 1968, he left a visible legacy by removing the signature golden arches from the building's architecture and placing them on signs out front. What McDonald's founder Ray Kroc called Turner's gift for "planning and vision" is reflected in a restaurant menu that includes the Quarter-Pounder, which he co-developed with a California franchise owner in 1971.

Restaurant sales may be recovering nicely in the U.S., but eateries are increasingly looking abroad, where diners are more accepting of innovations such as Pizza Hut's new cheeseburger-crusted pies in the Middle East. Think it's a joke? A fantasy food dreamed up by a teenage boy? Even the advertisement acknowledges how silly it all sounds. In the video, diners look on agog as a royal page brings in the monstrosity “masterpiece” - dubbed the “Crown Crust Pizza” - on a cushion.

Junk food is everywhere. We're eating way too much of it. And we're getting fat. Most of us know what we're doing and yet we do it anyway. So here's a suggestion offered by two researchers at the Rand Corp.:  Why not take a lesson from alcohol control policies and apply them to where food is sold and how it's displayed? “Many policy measures to control the obesity epidemic assume that people consciously and rationally choose what and how much they eat and therefore focus on providing information and more access to healthier foods,” note Dr. Deborah A. Cohen and Lila Rabinovich of Rand.

In addition to the 3,000 deaths it causes each year, contaminated food is very expensive. The cost of food poisoning in this country comes to $14 billion a year, according to a July 2012 study published in the Journal of Food Protection, including the medical expenses of the 128,000 who are hospitalized annually. That figure does not include the millions of dollars that each food recall costs the company involved, the legal expenses from victims' lawsuits or losses incurred by other companies when consumers hear, for example, about contaminated cantaloupes and then avoid all cantaloupes, including those that are perfectly safe.

Discussions of Proposition 37, the initiative that would require labeling of many genetically engineered foods, tend to bring up two arguments that both seem true at first blush. Opponents claim it would raise the price of food; supporters say it would result in better-informed consumers. But both assertions are more dubious than they appear. The No-on-37 campaign bases most of its claims of higher food prices on a study that it paid for, so obviously the findings are hardly unimpeachable.

Officials warned food companies that the government plans to step up inspections of warehouses after a federal raid revealed a warehouse in San Francisco that was swarming with rats, pigeons and insects. Last week, agents of the Food and Drug Administration raided the rat-infested 50,000-square-foot May Wah Trading Co. warehouse, where boxes of rice, bamboo shoots and other foods were stacked more than 10 feet high.

Much has been made of the wording in Proposition 37 about processed foods and the word “natural.” Although the intent seems clear, that the provision was meant to keep only genetically engineered food from carrying the “natural” label, the construction of the initiative is a little sloppy, and the state Legislative Analyst has said that the courts could interpret it to cover any processed food, including olive oil, dried fruit or canned tomatoes....

Marketers selling food to children and teens spent 20% less in 2009 than they did in 2006 and are making "modest nutritional improvements" to the products they promote, according to a new government report. Advertisers shelled out nearly $1.8 billion to target consumers ages 2 to 17, down from the $2.1 billion they allocated three years earlier, according to the Federal Trade Commission. But most of the decline came from a switch to online commercials from expensive television spots.

Re "Safe peanut butter, and more," Editorial, Nov. 29 As someone who has eaten several brands of peanut butter made at the now-shuttered Sunland Inc. plant in Portales, N.M., I easily could have been one of the 40-plus people sickened by the salmonella-tainted peanut butter the plant sent out. The blame for not fully implementing last year's Food Safety Modernization Act may rest with E. coli conservatives in the Republican Party, so-called...

Twinkies may live on after all. Bankrupt Hostess Brands Inc. and its striking union agreed to enter into mediation to try to resolve their differences, putting the baking company's planned liquidation on hold for now. At a U.S. Bankruptcy Court hearing Monday in White Plains, N.Y., the 82-year-old company sought permission to start shutting down its business. Instead, Judge Robert Drain urged Hostess and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union to consider mediation.

Much has been made of the wording in Proposition 37 about processed foods and the word “natural.” Although the intent seems clear, that the provision was meant to keep only genetically engineered food from carrying the “natural” label, the construction of the initiative is a little sloppy, and the state Legislative Analyst has said that the courts could interpret it to cover any processed food, including olive oil, dried fruit or canned tomatoes....

Discussions of Proposition 37, the initiative that would require labeling of many genetically engineered foods, tend to bring up two arguments that both seem true at first blush. Opponents claim it would raise the price of food; supporters say it would result in better-informed consumers. But both assertions are more dubious than they appear. The No-on-37 campaign bases most of its claims of higher food prices on a study that it paid for, so obviously the findings are hardly unimpeachable.

FACEBOOK FUN FACT What do Facebook employees eat at an all-night hackathon (its regular software-coding party)? Egg rolls and other Chinese food from the company's favorite restaurant Jing Jing in Palo Alto. [ Los Angeles Times ] 5 FOOD FESTS IN MEXICO Looking for a corn-and-tortilla fair worth traveling for? Here's one in the Mexico City borough of Xochimilco , plus a vanilla festival in Veracruz, a 127-year-old ice cream festival, an apple fair and Three Kings festival.

Fifty of the world's largest food, beverage and consumer product manufacturers plan to collaborate on an electronic marketplace that will allow them to purchase the estimated $200 billion of goods and services they use each year more cheaply and efficiently. Some of the biggest consumer product names such as Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble and Nestle USA are funding the venture with Grocery Manufacturers of America.

The No on Proposition 37 campaign emailed Thursday to tout a new study by UC Davis professors. It concludes that the proposition on the November ballot to require the labeling of genetically engineered foods would cost the food industry more than a billion dollars and lead to higher food costs from consumers. The study doesn't read like the usual, carefully couched work of academics. It's a spitfire of a report that boldly starts out, "A Costly Regulation with No Benefits. " That sounds more like No on 37 campaign literature than a university study.

BACON AND PORK SHORTAGE "NOW UNAVOIDABLE" A British trade group is predicting a pork and bacon shortage next year , blamed on the drought conditions that hurt the corn and soybean crops this year. [Los Angeles Times] MARKETING TO KIDS: SO HOW IS THE FOOD INDUSTRY DOING? The FTC is revising a 2008 report that looked at how food companies market products to children, expected to be released by the end of 2012 . [ABC News] NO MORE JUNK FOOD AT THE HOSPITAL...

The No on Proposition 37 campaign emailed Thursday to tout a new study by UC Davis professors. It concludes that the proposition on the November ballot to require the labeling of genetically engineered foods would cost the food industry more than a billion dollars and lead to higher food costs from consumers. The study doesn't read like the usual, carefully couched work of academics. It's a spitfire of a report that boldly starts out, "A Costly Regulation with No Benefits. " That sounds more like No on 37 campaign literature than a university study.