Happy Halloween! Food Week October 25 is full of myth busting, inflation, IPOs and NFTs, salmonella & phthalates and the always overrated McRib. Enjoy, if you dare…
MACRO
- Food Week October 25 saw Wages jump 1.5% in a 3 month period. If this keeps up, restaurants may end up paying a living wage…
- Bacon is rising faster than a Harvard College tuition. But to be fair bacon had a better year.
- This will be a La Nina year which means winter weather will suck. Just like it does every winter.
RETAIL AND CONSUMER
- Tainted Halloween Candy Myth Just Won’t Go Away. There is surely an intersection between people who believe in these urban myths and those who believe everything they read on Facebook.
- Speaking of myths that are misses, the cholesterol myth made people think a lot of foods were bad for them. Here is a list of some of them that really aren’t.
- Report claims 60% of ecommerce customers will abandon their cart if they cannot pay with their preferred payment method.
- Yuengling decided to give a 106 year old woman a truckload full of beer
RESTAURANTS AND FOODSERVICE
- Sodexo reports 13.3% drop in North American fiscal 2021 revenues. Food Management Companies are still getting crushed by COVID.
- In a perfect marriage of pointless things, the McDonald‘s issues NFTs for the McRib.
- Being fast and healthy is hard but so far, so good as salad chain Sweetgreen files to go public, hoping to double footprint.
- Chicago giant Portillo’s to become more than a regional brand following its $405M IPO. Hoping to grow 10 fold to 600 units.
- Fast Food packaging is a worrisome source of phthatlates, a chemical that messes with your metabolism
FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN
- Is it irony or trolling that a fungi-based alt-protein manufacturer Nature’s Fynd has set up in the old Union Stockyards?
- A House subcommittee finds Coronavirus infections at U.S. meat plants far higher than previous estimates. We at fork pitch have been talking about this for over a year. But US meat plants have been a humanitarian disaster.
- The salmonella onion outbreak is finally being unraveled – ProSource, imported from Chihuahua – but lack of accurate labeling plus long shelf life makes things more complicated.
- Salty Seabeans – spinach substitute- soak-up seawater: an environmental as well as food supply innovation.
FOOD WEEK LAGNIAPPE
- Meanwhile, kooky Keto kult keeps kooking.
- Will the water that makes great bagels make great spirits? A distiller is using NYC’s famous tap water.
- 38 Standout Dining Destinations in Chicago. Slightly embarrassed to say I have been to less than a third of these. Good news is most are reasonably priced.
- Much needed info – and myth busting – about absinthe