As noted in yesterday’s edition of Headline News and widely reported Tuesday and Wednesday by major media outlets, U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials uncovered a plot by those seeking to harm U.S. citizens through purposefully contaminating salad bars and buffets in restaurants and hotels with poison.

While many businesses in the produce industry have food security measures in place (whether as part of a food safety plan or as a separate plan), I’d like to remind our members of the various food security resources we have on our website. In addition to summaries of the bioterrorism regulations, we also have guidance for:

• Food importers and filers
• Retail stores and foodservice operators
• Producers, processors, and transporters
• Warehouse and distribution centers

To learn more, visit the Food Security section of the PMA website.

A couple weeks ago I read that a widely popular diet program has modified its system so that users can consume more fresh fruits and vegetables as part of their daily meals and snacks (though there seemed to be limits on fruit juice, dried fruit, and starchy vegetables). In a press statement, company officials said their program’s reformulation was spurred by new nutrition science that takes into account that protein and fiber are important for fullness and warding off hunger, and also factors in how hard the body has to work to process food into energy.

I found the timing of the announcement rather interesting, especially since this is the time of year when individuals typically start mulling over dietary and/or physical activity improvements for the coming New Year. In fact, a recent NPD study found that the largest deficiencies in adults’ diets are insufficient intake of fruits, vegetables, and dairy products and overconsumption of total fats.

For me, making changes to improve my overall diet (particularly my produce consumption) has been an ongoing goal – one that’s been made a little easier since my daughter usually leaves me three-quarters to half of a banana or a decent-sized portion of an apple to finish once she’s done with them. But I know I still have a long way to go. In addition to what I eat, finishing her leftovers isn’t going to get it done.

Here at PMA we recently took a look at consumer attitudes and found that the primary reasons shoppers are buying more fresh fruits and fresh vegetables are because they are interested in eating healthier and because they recognize produce as a source of vitamins and minerals.

And a separate PMA consumer study also found that produce isn’t as expensive as it’s sometimes made out to be. Depending on how intent a consumer is on finding bargains, s/he can get nine servings for anywhere between $2.18 and 88 cents. Our members can get free copies of these reports by logging into the PMA website.

You’ve heard the numbers about foodborne illness forever – 76 million Americans get sick and 5,000 die each year. Well, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has revised those numbers down. The CDC now says that there are 48 million cases of foodborne illness each year affecting one in six Americans. These illnesses, according to CDC, result in 128,000 hospitalizations and more than 3,000 deaths.

So what does this mean? Were the old numbers wrong? Are the new numbers better? Is this just about everyone retooling their message points about foodborne illness? Or have we really made progress in reducing foodborne illness? It’s likely a combination – better data, better understanding of foodborne illness, and improvements.

But all of that really isn’t important. What’s important is that one person sick from our products is one too many. Your efforts to make produce safer are key. Though we see lower numbers, we can’t let up on food safety programs – every day. PMA offers resources to help you.

Last week on his audio blog, PMA Chief Science & Technology Officer Dr. Bob Whitaker discussed issues surrounding product testing in part one of a multi-post discussion on this topic. While microbiological testing is nothing new to the industry, there has been a significant increase in the number of surveillance-driven product testing programs conducted by various government agencies, mostly focused on testing for Salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 in select commodities.

In addition to FDA testing product at the border, in mobile lab deployments, and as part of facility inspections and at distribution points, USDA is also involved through its microbiological data collection program via market-basket testing programs that use state labs as contractors to do the testing.

Dr. Bob noted that, while many other food industries can test raw or finished products with a very high level of certainty that they can rely on those tests to determine whether their products are free of contamination, the reality is that “produce items are chemically complex and the frequency and level of pathogen contamination is proving to be exceedingly low. This makes pathogen detection extremely difficult with current technology. Devising statistically significant product sampling programs is also problematic owing to the non-uniform nature of natural contamination events and the scope of production.”

He also raised other issues with product testing, including testing as part of a complete food safety program instead of testing (in and of itself) as the program. As always, you can visit the Ask Dr. Bob blog to sign up for future updates on this topic and others via e-mail.

Last week, I attended the Sustainability Summit put on by the Trading Partner Alliance (Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufacturers Association), which was designed to bring together retailers, manufacturers, government and advocacy groups around the common goal of environmentally responsible business practices. Here are some insights from that event.

One of the common themes in presentations and in conversations with attendees was the need to have a point person responsible for sustainability in your organization. This person doesn’t have to do it all, but they must coordinate it all.

General Mills chairman and CEO Ken Powell noted that such an internal leader must link all business functions. I happened to speak with two regional retailers who are contemplating the same thing: John Scherer of Schnuck Markets in St. Louis and Joe Mac Johnson of Brookshires Grocery in Tyler, TX. Both gentlemen talked about the need to look at sustainability efforts across the company, to allow various functions to share ideas and innovations, and even centralize communications about all the company’s efforts.

At one of the breakout sessions, speaker Harriet Hentges of Ahold USA said that Ahold has a cross-department, cross-functional group that inventories what the company is doing and what it could do to advance a different concept of sustainability – health and wellness.

I got the impression that when a company starts looking at everything it’s doing in sustainability, it finds a lot more than it thought it would. Who in your company is the point person for sustainability? What might you discover if you took a holistic look at your firm’s efforts, and how can you be sure your story is told?

A new survey by the American Dietetic Association says that many children are skipping meals and eating more snacks. The ADA polled kids age 8 to 17 and their parents and found that most children did not eat breakfast and about a quarter of them didn’t eat dinner. According to the survey, snacks are often eaten to replace skipped meals.

More than 55 percent of African American, Hispanic, and white children reported snacking immediately after school. In addition, regular evening or after dinner snacking was reported by 24 to 26 percent of all kids. With full credit to our friends over at the Produce for Better Health Foundation (which is where I initially found this survey), here are some tips for fruit and veggie snack ideas for kids that might be useful for any community programs your organization offers:

• Smoothies made with fresh or frozen fruit
• Canned fruit or single serve fruit cups
• Baby carrots, bell pepper strips, or broccoli and cauliflower florets with low-fat dressing or hummus for dipping
• Fresh fruit dipped in low-fat yogurt or applesauce or with a dab of peanut butter
• Celery sticks filled with peanut butter or low-fat cream cheese
• Any whole piece of fruit they enjoy like a banana, apple, pear, peach, or whichever is their favorite

Of those suggestions, my wife and I use some of them with our 14-month old daughter – though with a handful of teeth in her mouth, only a few of them work. She enjoys pieces of bananas, apples, peaches, and pears, along with fruit yogurt and most vegetables. So I like to think we’re on our way to establishing good eating habits with her.

Plus, even our border collie gets a partial five-a-day as our girl has taken to dropping pieces of her meals on the floor as a signal she’s done eating, which are quickly consumed by the four-legged vacuum.

Last week I attended the Sustainability Summit put on by FMI and GMA, which focused on the common goal of environmentally responsible business practices. Here are some insights from that event.

Jason Clay offered some sobering observations about our planet’s future, particularly on the prospect of having three billion more mouths to feed later this century. Clay is the senior vice president of market transformation for the World Wildlife Fund. (Is that a great title or what? Market transformation.) Here are some of his observations:

• Food production has more impact on the planet than any other activity. Now we use one liter of water to produce one food calorie, which is unsustainable. And we waste one of three food calories – 33% waste is also unsustainable.
• Solutions must be science-based, and we cannot take genetics off the table.
• What works now to feed 6.7 billion people will not work when we have to feed nine billion. It will take everyone working together, including environmental group and the food industry collaboration, as food consumption doubles by 2050.
• Sustainability is a precompetitive issue. The 21st Century supply chain is about partners, not adversaries, and it is transformational, not transactional.
• In 40 years, we will have to produce the same amount of food that we did in the last 8,000 years.

What could all of that mean for us today? Research and development, traditional breeding and GMOs? Global production and sourcing? New production paradigms? New distribution channels? What will the successful company of 2050 be and what can you do now to put your company on that path? What does market transformation mean to you?

Yesterday, U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 into law. This bill, which we have talked about at length here on Field to Fork during the past year, will improve children’s health by making fruits and vegetables more available for our nation’s youth by setting nutritional standards for food sold outside school meals and by improving the nutrition of food in schools.

PMA President and CEO Bryan Silbermann noted in a media statement that “the bill’s proposals align nicely with components of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign against childhood obesity. PMA is committed to children’s health through education and collaborative efforts with Let’s Move to get more salad bars in schools. And we look forward to building on our ongoing relationship with USDA as it works to implement the changes put forth in the bill. Healthy kids mean a healthy future for our country.”

Thank you to all members who wrote their Congressional leaders as this bill went through a much longer-than-expected journey to the President’s desk. Your voices made a difference and we thank you for your sustained support on this important issue.

According to The National Restaurant Association’s “What’s Hot” survey of more than 1,500 professional chefs, local and hyper-local sourcing, healthy children’s meals, sustainable seafood and gluten-free cuisine will be among the hottest trends on restaurant menus next year. The survey also found that mobile food trucks and pop-up restaurants will be the top operational trend in restaurants next year. Also among the top 20 hot menu trends in terms of fruits and vegetables are organic produce and fruit/vegetable children’s side items.

(In case you haven’t heard of hyper-local sourcing, NRA defines it as restaurants with their own gardens and/or chefs who do their own butchering. It was new to me, too.)

A year from now, it’ll be interesting to look back and see how many of these predicted trends took hold in the restaurant industry – especially since PMA, NRA, and IFDA are partners in the Foodservice 2020 initiative, which seeks to double produce use in foodservice within a decade.

If you’d like to learn more about consumer attitudes and perceptions of local produce (as well as sustainability and other topics), visit the PMA website for a copy of Identifying Consumer Trends in the Produce Category, our latest research report on consumer perceptions and behaviors. For example, it found that local-oriented customers care more about things (e.g. supporting local community, being environmentally friendly, and connecting to the farmer) when buying fresh produce.

This week I attended the Sustainability Summit put on by the Trading Partner Alliance (Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufacturers Association), designed to bring together retailers, manufacturers, government and advocacy groups around the common goal of environmentally responsible business practices. These are just some of the insights from that event; there’ll be more posts in the coming days.

Ken Powell, chairman and CEO of General Mills, offered some interesting food for thought as we all contemplate what we can do to advance sustainability. Much of what he said correlated to our industry’s efforts.

He noted that General Mills at one point put energy meters on its equipment. That initial cost of $184,000 yielded savings of $665,000. For General Mills, that’s probably chump change, but the point is that for every company there’s lots of low-hanging fruit, small changes that yield big results. We saw that in our post on Procacci Brothers’ switch to hand dryers.

Cheerios is a General Mills product, and Powell told how the company uses the oat hulls (a waste product from Cheerios production) to fuel its own plants, other plants, and even homes. I was reminded of Gills Onions’ efforts to use onion waste to produce energy. I know there are other stories about using waste to improve your business.

The company’s goals for 2015 are a 20% reduction in energy, water, and greenhouse gas emissions; a 35% reduction in transportation/fuel; and a 50% drop in solid waste generation.

Powell also said that General Mills has been working on sustainability since early last century. We hear that from members from time to time. It goes something like this: “Hey, my company has been doing this forever, so when do we get credit for long-term efforts?” A lot of our members have these practices so ingrained in their business persona that it doesn’t seem to them to be newsworthy. But it is.

Sustainability efforts are important, whether you’ve just started them or it was your great-grandfather who started them. No one knows unless you tell your story. We highlight efforts here in Field to Fork and on the PMA website. Let us know what you’re doing.