Intense competition among grocers is forcing Kroger to slash prices on popular items like milk and eggs — staples that help sway where shoppers go.The company, which operates Fred Meyer, Ralphs and Fry's, on Thursday reported its second straight quarter of declining sales at established locations after more than seven years of uninterrupted growth. [node:read-more:link]
This is a golden age of beverage innovation in America, according to market research firm Packaged Facts. This is thanks to a desire for more healthful products with cleaner labels; the emergence of new ingredients, production processes and technologies; and the coming of age of millennials as the dominant consumer demographic, a group that is adventurous when it comes to trying new things. [node:read-more:link]
Arla Foods has been ordered to halt its new $30m ‘Live Unprocessed’ ad campaign – which makes a virtue of using milk from cows that have not been fed the growth hormone rBST - in the wake of legal action* filed by rbST maker Eli Lilly [node:read-more:link]
To be able to build those tools, they first need to be intimately familiar with the substance and the microorganisms that tend to contaminate it. They'll sequence and analyze the DNA and RNA of dairy samples from Cornell's farm, as well as of all the microorganisms in environments milk tends to make contact with, including the cows themselves, from the moment it's pumped. Their tests will characterize what's "normal" for raw milk, so the tools they make can easily tell if something's wrong even if it's an unknown contaminant we've never seen before. [node:read-more:link]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture halted imports of fresh beef from Brazil on Thursday over recurring safety concerns about the products. Since March, USDA officials increased testing to cover "100% of all meat products" coming from Brazil, and turned away 11% of the country's fresh beef products, the USDA said in a statement. In total, the health officials have turned away 1.9 million pounds of Brazilian beef products over health concerns, sanitary conditions and animal health issues.According to the USDA, the rejected products never made it to grocery store shelves. [node:read-more:link]
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the grand opening of Foodlink’s new $4.9 million community kitchen in Rochester. [node:read-more:link]
In the past year, the GMO debate has faded as attention has shifted to the promise of genetically “edited” foods in which producers trim existing DNA in foods rather than introducing new DNA, as the case in GMO-based genetic engineering. DuPont has emerged as a major innovation in genetic editing with a new unit called CRISPR-Cas, designed to improve seeds without incorporating DNA from other species. [node:read-more:link]
Three consumer groups on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Sanderson Farms Inc. accusing the company of falsely advertising that its chicken is “100 percent natural.” The groups suing Sanderson Farms are the Organic Consumers Association, Friends of the Earth and Center for Food Safety. In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in California, the groups said testing in 2015 and 2016 by USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service found 49 instances in which samples of Sanderson products tested positive for residues of synthetic drugs. [node:read-more:link]
A legal dispute over labeling vegetable oil as “natural” even though it contains genetically engineered ingredients could have repercussions for other food-related class action lawsuits.Earlier this year, the 9th U.S. [node:read-more:link]
Why are some foods cheap and other foods expensive? Hint: It’s (mostly) not subsidies. Although they’ve certainly played a role in shaping our food supply such that we have huge quantities of just a few crops — a recipe for low prices — the discrepancy that seems to be at issue is the one between commodity crops such as corn and soy, and the fruits and vegetables that everyone’s trying to get us to eat more of. There’s a factor there that plays a much larger role than subsidies, and it doesn’t get much airtime. [node:read-more:link]
