Fresh Cut Magazine

Suppliers, retailers will have to work together

By all indications, Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) rules covering produce will go into effect Sept. 30 – but there’s no need to panic. “I don’t expect this to be a significant burden on growers,” said Robert Guenther, senior vice president of public policy for United Fresh Produce Association (UFPA). “The real debate will be between suppliers and retailers.” Suppliers and retailers will have time to ease into the new rules, despite the approaching deadline. Guenther expects USDA to implement a “grace period” – perhaps six months, perhaps a year – after Sept. 30, giving the industry time to fully comply with the new rules before they’re actually enforced. USDA set a precedent with the seafood industry, which was given a year to comply with the new rules after they were enacted, according to UFPA. The produce industry has been waiting for COOL to go into effect since…  » Read more

---

Is Fresh-Cut Worth the Price

Don’t let the headline scare you or make you write nasty e-mails to Fresh Cut magazine or me. Yes, they definitely are worth the price. But because the cost of food has received so much negative press lately, I would like to offer a compromise for you to tell people who feel that fresh-cut items are way too expensive to purchase on a regular basis. Now that summer is in full swing, eating habits around the country have changed. Lighter, hopefully healthier foods are being consumed. I know we tend to eat considerably more fresh fruit in the summer and try to eat all the local food we can. With prices for food rising so quickly, families are stretching their food dollars as never before. Spam is flying off the shelves – but maybe those folks should consider some alternatives to that product. Normally, an economy…  » Read more

---

Public Relations

An immediate reporting and traceback system is essential to finding food-related disease outbreaks and ending them quickly. The ongoing tomato crisis is a perfect illustration of the need for faster outbreak identification. In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security introduced a multi-pronged approach to securing the country’s food supply. The agency established communication protocols among various agencies and research and monitoring institutes and encouraged food industries to be innovative and reevaluate their food safety guidelines. In the four years since, a number of outbreaks involving produce, prepared foods and meats have gone undetected – or were kept quiet – for far too long. Pot pies, spinach, beef and now tomatoes have been implicated in diseases a month after people started getting sick, In the case of tomatoes, illnesses of the rare serotype of salmonella first began appearing in mid-April, but the outbreak was just appearing in the…  » Read more

---

Mann Packing introduces leafy green products to retail customers

Mann Packing Co.’s is almost synonymous with broccoli. That’s no surprise, as the Salinas, Calif.-based grower, shipper and processor is the world’s largest shipper of the vegetable. But the company also handles more than 30 different vegetables and Lori Koster, vice president of marketing, is excited about some of the new, non-broccoli items. A Mann Packing affiliate company, Fresh Leaf Farms, processes leafy green vegetables in a state-of-the-art facility surrounded by 3,500 acres of leafy greens. That facility has been churning out fresh-cut single-serve cuts of whole leaf red and green head lettuce and romaine hearts for foodservice customers in 2000, and is set to release them to retail customers under the name Simply Singles. “Simply Singles were so well received by the foodservice industry we’ve spent the past years working on keeping acreage and production capacity up with that demand,” Koster said. Fresh Leaf Farms…  » Read more

---