We hope you are enjoying a beautiful fall weekend. Here are items from the food world that got our attention this week. Nestled in the links below is information about price fixing in the chicken industry, a Nobel for CRISPR, new Pappy Van Winkle and the weirdness of grapefruit.
Macro
- Financial Markets seem to like the idea of an uncontested election.
- Housing market seems to be slowing down.
- Job market is flat and at a high level of unemployment.
Grocery and Consumer
- Foods we no longer eat. We were pretty weird. We probably still are. I actually sold some of these things – tapioca, ambrosia salad, Hi-C – early in my career. But I could never bring myself to sell cottage cheese. There are somethings even salesmen won’t do.
- A burger substitute priced the same as meat? The assumption has always been that the price for burger substitutes was an inhibiting factor versus ground beef. Now we will find out.
- The annual Pappy Van Winkle Easter egg hunt is on. I am not much of a bourbon drinker but I would love to get my hands on the rye whiskey they are introducing this year.
Restaurants and Food Service
- Price Fixing in the Chicken world. Employees and executives from Perdue Farms, Koch Foods, Pilgrim’s, Claxton Poultry Farms, Case Farms and George’s Inc. were all named in a case where they coordinated pricing to food service clients. When there are few suppliers, price fixing becomes both easier and more tempting.
- Fast food myths, or common knowledge for the highly gullible.
- Foodservice jobs remain 2.3 million below pre-COVID.
Food Supply Chain
- Two women win Nobel prize for Chemistry for their work with CRISPR.
- When life gives you lemons, make… brandy?.
- The conditions in meat plants remain ugly with a trail of illnesses and death. Workers fighting for workmen’s comp – employers saying that the workers didn’t contract COVID at the plant. More shutdowns a possibility as cases spike in upper Midwest. ALSO It is more dangerous to work in a chicken plant than in a coal mine.
Lagniappe
- US Army now endorses Strategic napping. If they had done this a few decades ago they may have gotten my business.
- Piracy, guacamole and the Mutiny on the bounty A 17th century man named William Dampier was a combination buccaneer and a food tourist. His travelogues contain descriptions of eating manatees, flamingoes and penguins.
- When domestic pigs meet feral hogs…
- Grapefruit: 1.)Has a name that doesn’t make any damn sense, 2.)Is the result of accidental hybridization that no one is sure about where or when that happened, 3.)Was crucial in the development of Florida, 4.)Masks the flavor of alcohol better than jut about anything, 5.)Has really weird (and dangerous) interactions with certain, very common drugs.