Food Industry

Ronda Storms is a Republican state senator from Florida. She is also a mom who buys the groceries for her family of four. A few months ago, Storms, 46, started noticing that some fellow shoppers were using federal food stamp money to purchase a lot of unhealthful junk. And it galled her - at a time when Florida was cutting Medicaid reimbursement rates, public school funding and jobs - that people were indulging in sugary, fatty, highly-processed treats on the public dime. "If we're going to be cutting services across the board," she said, "then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas.

They sifted through about 800 programs to prevent and fight obesity--to find the ones most likely to counter the nation's growing girth. In the end, a panel of independent experts asserted that only by implementing many of those initiatives at once can the nation make real progress. Reversing the nation's "obesogenic," or fat-promoting, culture will require sweeping changes across all aspects of daily life, "modifying factors that shape individual choices and incidental behaviors," the Institute of Medicine concluded in a report issued Tuesday.

The Klaus family has lived the fast-food industry's nightmare: people getting sick from E. coli. A few days after picking up a dinner of hamburgers and chicken nuggets at a Wendy's drive-in, the Salem, Ore., family received a call from county health inspectors inquiring whether they had eaten food from the chain. JoAnn Klaus already knew something was wrong: Her 4-year-old son, Evan, was hospitalized with diarrhea and dehydration, and 23-month-old Scott had similar symptoms.

A member of one of California's best-known farming families pleaded guilty Friday to federal criminal charges related to a scheme to inflate the prices of tomato products. Frederick Scott Salyer, founder of tomato processing company SK Foods, pleaded guilty in Sacramento to racketeering and price-fixing charges. Under a plea agreement with prosecutors, Salyer faces between four and seven years in federal prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced July 10. Salyer, 56, who lives in Pebble Beach, remains free on $6-million bail.

Coming soon to a grocery store near you: a speed-read nutrition label on the front of food packages that provides large-type icons that list the amount of calories, fat, sodium and sugars. New labels, called Nutrition Keys by the food industry that created them, were announced Monday by the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Marketing Assn. The groups say they developed the labels in response to First Lady Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign that in part calls for an easier way for shoppers, especially parents, to make informed food choices.

Manufacturers of foods pitched most heavily to kids -- breakfast cereals, snacks, carbonated beverages and restaurant fare -- should develop and reformulate their offerings to cut salt, added sugars and saturated fat and ensure they contribute meaningfully to a child's healthy diet, a federal working group recommended on Thursday. The food manufacturers should make those changes soon, with a target date just five years away, in 2016; they should revamp their advertising pitches and marketing messages to stress the nutritional values of their fare and shift their ad campaigns away from less healthy options; and they should do all this voluntarily (please)

Foreign investment in the U.S. food industry has almost tripled since the mid-1970s but is showing signs of slowing, according to a report by the Agriculture Department. Between 1976 and 1982, foreign ownership increased 60% in food manufacturing, 300% in wholesaling and retailing, and 600% in the rapidly expanding food service industry. "Despite the growth, foreign-owned firms still employ only 3.5%, about 346,000 people, of the entire food industry work force," the report said.

The merger of three major Los Angeles-area food industry union locals into what will be the largest United Food and Commercial Workers local in the western United States has gained approval of all three locals, a spokesman said Thursday. This week, members of Butchers Local 274 voted 99.3% in favor of the merger and members of Meat Cutters Local 421 voted 86.4% to adopt the new structure, according to Dan Swinton, a spokesman for the Food and Commercial Workers.

The food industry, which now decides when to recall tainted products, objected Saturday to President Clinton's push for government authority to force recalls of unsafe meat and poultry. "Congress should grant [the Agriculture Department] the authority to impose civil penalties and to order mandatory recalls of unsafe meat and poultry," Clinton said in his weekly radio address.

The food industry--the largest and traditionally one of the most stable industries in the United States--will face unprecedented change in the 1990s. Some change will result from the brisk merger and acquisition activity begun in the past decade. Between 1979 and 1989, nearly 7,000 consolidations occurred in the industry in the United States alone. Today, the top 50 food companies represent 50% of U.S. sales, double their market share of 10 years ago.

Greek yogurt is the Jeremy Lin of food products, launching out of nowhere into a stunning and sudden rise in fortune. Now comes the latest, and likely coldest, product - Ben & Jerry's Frozen Greek Yogurt. The Vermont company debuted four flavors this week: Strawberry Shortcake, Raspberry Fudge Chunk, Banana Peanut Butter and Blueberry Vanilla Graham. "Our flavor gurus," said Ben & Jerry's spokesman Sean Greenwood, "who try to keep on top of trends and tastes, were well aware of Greek yogurt completely owning the refrigerated aisle.

For millions of Americans, bagged salads are a miracle food, the perfect mix of health and convenience. Time-pressed cooks can rip open a bag and pour the leaves right into the bowl, reassured by the "triple-washed" label that some wondrous process has rendered these greens squeaky clean and ready for dinner. They don't want to think about E. coli O157:H7 . And the salad industry doesn't want them thinking about it either. That's why the safety of bagged greens has emerged as one of the most pressing issues in today's fresh produce business.

Ronda Storms is a Republican state senator from Florida. She is also a mom who buys the groceries for her family of four. A few months ago, Storms, 46, started noticing that some fellow shoppers were using federal food stamp money to purchase a lot of unhealthful junk. And it galled her - at a time when Florida was cutting Medicaid reimbursement rates, public school funding and jobs - that people were indulging in sugary, fatty, highly-processed treats on the public dime. "If we're going to be cutting services across the board," she said, "then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas.

Danny Meyer began doing most of the household grocery shopping when his fiancee started graduate school. Meyer goes to Whole Foods in Chicago for produce and specialty items, Jewel-Osco for staples and Trader Joe's when he needs to really stock up. He says he is not particularly brand-loyal and is susceptible to impulse buys. "I walk in and go with the flow of the store, going aisle by aisle," he said. "I like to walk through all the aisles even if I don't think I need anything there, because sometimes something will catch my eye. " Meyer, 35, is part of a growing contingent of men taking over grocery duty.

WASHINGTON--Advertisers and food and beverage industry officials called the government's new guidelines for advertising directed toward children a "reckless" maneuver in light of today's fragile economy. After Congress asked the Federal Trade Commission, along with three other federal agencies, to develop a strategy to target childhood obesity, the FTC released a set of guidelines in April. They call on advertisers to encourage children to choose healthy foods and to limit the amount of saturated fat, trans fat, added sugars and sodium in food marketed to children.

If only food were as simple as cigarettes. There are no ambiguities about the evils of smoking. It sickens people who do it and endangers those around them. Despite remarkable progress in persuading people not to take up the habit in recent decades, smoking is still the No. 1 preventable cause of death in this country, and it has no known health benefits. Overeating, especially of low-nutrition junk food, is a bad habit too. Obesity is a fast-rising threat to American health. Yet, unlike with cigarettes, we can't "quit" food.

What's cooking in the local food processing industry? The Food Industry Business Roundtable (FIBR) will present its annual "A Taste of FIBR" on Thursday in downtown Los Angeles. Nearly two dozen companies will be serving food specialties, from vegetarian taquitos to gourmet ice cream--all made right here in the Southland. Jack Kyser, chief economist for Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., will give a talk on what's ahead for the industry.

James Bishop, 86, food industry executive who helped introduce a popular spaghetti sauce. A resident of Pasadena for much of his life, Bishop was a co-founder of Baker-Crawford-Bishop, a Southern California food brokerage operation. The company merged several times, changing its name to Crown/BBK, and eventually to today's Advantage Crown. Bishop was president of the brokerage from 1970 to 1974 and chairman of the board from 1974 until his retirement in 1978.

The restaurant industry is quietly — and successfully — fighting back against the enactment of so-called Happy Meal bans, which forbid restaurants like McDonald's to hand out toys with children's meals that are high in calories. Moving under the radar so stealthily that in some cases local politicians and anti-obesity activists missed it entirely, lobbyists in Florida and Arizona backed successful efforts to take away the power to enact such bans from cities and counties. In Nebraska, a proposed statewide Happy Meal ban died in February, even before its first legislative committee hearing.

Manufacturers of foods pitched most heavily to kids -- breakfast cereals, snacks, carbonated beverages and restaurant fare -- should develop and reformulate their offerings to cut salt, added sugars and saturated fat and ensure they contribute meaningfully to a child's healthy diet, a federal working group recommended on Thursday. The food manufacturers should make those changes soon, with a target date just five years away, in 2016; they should revamp their advertising pitches and marketing messages to stress the nutritional values of their fare and shift their ad campaigns away from less healthy options; and they should do all this voluntarily (please)