National Foods

B. Manischewitz Co. said its board has postponed the special meeting of shareholders until July 11 to allow additional time to consider an acquisition proposal received last week from an affiliate of National Foods.

NEW YORK -- Beginning a day of protests that organizers say will spread to 50 cities and 1,000 stores across the country, a crowd of chanting workers gathered Thursday morning at a McDonald's in midtown Manhattan to call for higher wages and the chance to join a union. About 500 people, including workers, activists, religious leaders, news crews and local politicians, gathered outside the McDonald's on Fifth Avenue. The protesters chanted "Si Se Puede" ("Yes, We Can") and "Hey, hey, ho, ho $7.25 has got to go," holding signs saying "On Strike: Can't Survive on $7.25," referring to the federal minimum wage.

New Bid for Manischewitz: B. Manischewitz Co. said New York-based National Foods Inc. submitted a new bid to buy the company for $43.3 million, or $816 a share, in cash through an affiliate. The new bid tops a $40.1-million, or $755.50-a-share, offer for Jersey City, N.J.-based Manischewitz by Levine, Tessler, Leichtman & Co. of Beverly Hills. Manischewitz had scheduled a shareholders meeting for next Friday to vote on the Levine, Tessler offer after National Foods failed to complete financing for a prior offer.

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.

Manischewitz Plans Vote: B. Manischewitz Co., a Jersey City, N.J., food company, said it is proceeding with a scheduled June 22 shareholder vote on a $39.3 million offer for the company from Beverly Hills-based Levine, Tessler, Leichtman & Co. Manischewitz said a competing bidder, National Foods Inc., has not been able to complete financing for its proposed $42.4 million offer. In addition, a group including Santa Monica Partners withdrew its conditional offer for Manischewitz.

Matzo maker B. Manischewitz Co. said Thursday that it has agreed to a sweetened takeover bid by a Beverly Hills investment firm that topped a "best and final" offer from a rival kosher products firm. Manischewitz late Wednesday accepted an offer of $841 a share, or $44.6 million, by Levine, Tessler, Leichtman & Co. That bid surpassed by $1 a share an enhanced offer by National Foods, the distributor of Hebrew National products. Last month, Jersey City, N.J.

Court Orders Manischewitz Vote Delay: An Ohio state court ordered B. Manischewitz Co. to postpone until June 30 a shareholder vote on a Beverly Hills investment firm's $40.1-million takeover offer. The vote was scheduled for Thursday. The delay--the result of a lawsuit filed by a dissident shareholder of Manischewitz--will give National Foods Inc. more time to nail down financing for its own $43.3-million bid for the Jersey City, N.J., company. However, if the plaintiff fails to post a $100,000 bond by this afternoon, the meeting will proceed as planned, according to Levine, Tessler, Leichtman & Co., the Beverly Hills firm whose bid has already been approved by Manischewitz's board.

New Bids for Manischewitz Reported: A bid to take over B. Manischewitz Co., one of the nation's best-known makers of kosher food and wine, hit a roadblock when two higher offers emerged just before a company-imposed deadline. Manischewitz declined to disclose the value of the new offers but said both were higher than the $40-million bid put forward earlier by Levine, Tessler, Leichtman & Co. The 101-year-old company, based in Jersey City, N.J., signed a merger agreement March 14 with Levine Tessler, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, and would have to pay a $1.7-million fee if the deal failed to go through.

Tradition and modernity exist side by side at B. Manischewitz Co., a kosher food company known for its matzo. But by necessity the emphasis is on tradition. Each workday, rabbis assigned to Manischewitz pass a small shul, or synagogue, on their way into the Jersey City, N.J., matzo plant. There they oversee production to ensure strict adherence to kashruth , the 4,000-year-old laws that govern kosher eating and food preparation. When special Passover matzo (a flat, unleavened bread)

A large jump in the number of people eligible for food stamps and welfare benefits this year is costing states and the federal government billions of dollars, a published report said today. At least 44 states have reported increases in enrollment, with some rising up to 50%, according to an Agriculture Department report quoted in The New York Times. The number of people receiving food stamps rose by 1.

After languishing for more than a year, a food-safety bill that has enjoyed strong bipartisan support passed the Senate on Tuesday, raising prospects for tougher and more extensive federal inspections and other safeguards. The bill, which President Obama supports, still needs to be reconciled with differing provisions in legislation passed by the House in July 2009. But the Senate's approval, by a 73-25 margin, was cheered by food safety experts and advocacy groups as a sign that the long delay could be nearing an end and the nation's food-safety laws will receive their first major overhaul in decades.

Robert Downs leads the scientists who sniff at fish. Each day, his team of seven sensory experts dip their noses into large Pyrex bowls of snapper, tuna and other raw seafood to test for even a whiff of the pungent oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. This is not Grand Cru wine. "We use specific terms for the aroma," said Downs, who supervises the seafood smellers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's marine lab here. "Diesel oil. Bunker oil. Asphalt.

On most days, Melina Jakasoni's three small children survive on a single meal of boiled and mashed pumpkin leaves. When her scrounging pays off, the young mother is able to make porridge from donated corn husks. On rare occasions, a neighbor allows her to forage in her yard for groundnuts. Once again, hunger is stalking Africa. The calamity here is one piece of a food crisis--partly natural and partly man-made--that is sweeping southern Africa.

The craving for souvlaki comes over me about once a month. I am usually in the center of town when that irresistible waft--the scent of grilled meat (either pork or lamb), garlic and oregano, coupled with the smell of warm, doughy pita bread--hits. The Greeks have a word for it: tsikna, the meaning of which encompasses both sound (i.e., the sizzle) and smell (that of pleasantly charred meat). I usually give in to temptation at one of several favorite holes in the wall.

Philip Morris Cos., parent of Kraft Foods, on Sunday agreed to buy cookie and cracker giant Nabisco Holdings Corp. for $14.9 billion, making the nation's largest food company even more powerful with brands on virtually every supermarket aisle. The announcement comes at a time when many of the largest players in the slow-growing food business have been looking to consolidate in order to cut costs, boost sales and increase their clout with grocery retailers.

Public health authorities snapped into action Monday to tackle a virulent strain of bacteria that has sickened at least 6,333 people in southern Japan, most of them children believed to have contracted acute food poisoning from their school lunches. The culprit in Japan's worst food poisoning outbreak in a decade is the same strain of E. coli bacteria that tainted American hamburgers in the West in 1993, killing four people and making about 500 others ill.

About 13,600 striking steel workers set up picket lines at 75 can company plants nationwide after union representatives in Hollywood, Fla., were unable to negotiate a contract agreement on wages, pensions and other issues. The United Steelworkers' coast-to-coast walkout affected 75 plants of the National Can Co., American Can Co., Crown, Cork & Seal and Continental Can U.S.

From the Rockies to the Appalachians, hunters are helping the hungry by donating deer, elk, and other wild animals they kill to food banks. For Iris Bostic, who supports a family of four on her Social Security check, the two-pound packages of ground venison she brings home from the Mountaineer Food Bank mean she doesn't have to go without meat. "We wouldn't eat red meat at all if it wasn't for the free deer," said Bostic, 64, who lives outside Charleston, W.Va.

There's a Chinese restaurant in Rosemead where the Builder's Emporium used to be, a Chinese restaurant in Alhambra in what once was the Chowder House. The Edwards Drive-In in San Gabriel is now an enormous stucco mall. It has 15 restaurants in it, all Chinese. In Monterey Park, there are now so many Chinese restaurants that you could eat Chinese every weekend for more than a year and never hit the same place twice. Rosemead has 50 jammed into five square miles.

Orange County letter carriers picked up nearly a million pounds of donated food as they delivered letters Saturday, during the first nationwide food drive organized by the National Assn. of Letter Carriers. The food will be distributed to groups helping needy senior citizens, unemployed people and the homeless throughout the county, said Mark Lowry, director of the Orange County Community Development Center in Garden Grove.