Welcome to Food Week May 10, 2024. There some hinky things going on out there. A small chain closes and goes to foreclosure before even declaring bankrupcy. Bread bowl hats. Judges with conflicts of interest. A cure for food allergies. Gourmet hot dogs. Junk charges for no real reason. The Allegheny cocktail. Enjoy but be suspicious.
MACRO
- Oil price fixing caused 2% of all inflation in 2021
- What La Niña will mean for agriculture.
- Does Regenron have a cure for food allergies? All of them?
RETAIL AND CONSUMER
- On line grocery sales growth tripling in store sales.
- The air fryer has disrupted the CPG world.
- Energy drinks found to have serious negative effects on young adults. Maybe people are catching on: Celsius is struggling. Unfortunately, an alternative is seltzer water but it seems to have its own issues with forever chemicals.
- Is it me or is it weird that Fotrcot and Dom’s completely shuttered and started a foreclosure sale of assets only a few months after merging and re-capitalizing the business. But no explanation has been forthcoming
RESTAURANTS AND FOODSERVICE
- All of a sudden, the hot dog is hot. Fine dining. All the Rage in San Francisco. Oscar Mayer releasing stuffed hot dogs.
- Panera bread bowl hat. I have nothing to add.
- Someone who gets upsold truffle butter for $18 has been fooled at least twice.
- Panera dropping crazy charged up lemonades. after several wrongful death lawsuits filed. quick story, one morning I was headed into work on 2 hours sleep and stopped at my loacal Panera for one of those lemonades. Boy did it work – emmitted a low humming noise for severalhours.
- Door Dash is getting cheaper. Take their word for it. Instacart and Uber join forces in offering restaurant delivey throught the Instacart app. And all of them are pushing back against minimum wages for their drivers.
- Judge vacated the NRLB s ruling on joint employer regulations. Board appealing; judge’s conflict of interests less than appealing.
- Adding service charges just because you feel like it. However, junk fees are now illegal in Los Angeles.
FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN
- Not that it’s completely obvious, but the controversy over lab grown meat is a form of the culture wars.
- Beyond Meat suffers 8th straight quarter of revenue decline.
- Brown eggs aren’t better, the birds just eat more, so they cost more. But people tend to equate price with quality.
- Tribal nations get into meat processing.
- Can’t fix stupid: Avian Influenza in raw milk doesn’t deter sales.
- Bringing to market ‘climate friendly ‘ beef is tricky, to say the least. A guide to climate firnedly shopping.
- Is coffee about to go the way of cocoa? Supply shortages, speculation causing price spikes. Just in time: a quarter billion Chinese discover they love coffee, too. And decaf might actually get banned, because of chemicals used in processing.
DRINK CORNER
- Liver-wise, red wine is the least harmful drink.
- Published a guide on storing alcohol a little while back but this article is better. TLDR? Over 40 proof, pretty safe at room termperature. If it is a mixed with wine or other organics, probably refrigerate even if 40 proof. But refrigeration doesn’t hurt anything, ever.
- The world’s oldest beer competition. Best bottled beer: Kirin. A different competition, this one for Bourbon chooses a champion at about $65 a bottle.
- Breakout the Sidecars: new Chinese tarriffs to create a glut of cognac, brandy.
- Mixing a dry Manhatan with a Whiskey Sour produces…something. It’s called an Allegheny.
- Agave based Vodka from Weber Ranch. FWIW I had an Agave based gin a couple of years ago at the Fancy Food show and it was quite excellent.
FOOD WEEK MAY 3 LAGNIAPPE
- 14 foods that are reallly bad for you, including several percieved as healthy.
- Yes, ultra-processed food leads to poorer health outcomes. But reserachers are only starting to understand why.
- You’ve heard of the best thing since sliced bread but what about a plastic encased, individual slice of bread?
- The oldest recipes in the world. Oldest almost 4k.