Fresh Cut Magazine

CSI: Fresh-Cuts

Today’s food safety measures require companies to anticipate the unexpected and exceed FDA’s requirements. That’s a lesson a Massachusetts company learned the hard way. Chang Farm issued a recall of its bean sprouts and soy sprouts in late May, following a positive finding of listeria monocytogenes in a retail pack. While the company does the requisite testing for salmonella and E. coli, listeria testing isn’t required by FDA. Fresh-cut processors can learn from this mistake. Meeting FDA’s guidelines isn’t enough to protect a business from an outbreak – even meeting buyers’ audit requirements isn’t enough. Contamination can occur at many points during growing, harvesting, transport or processing, so a holistic approach to food safety is needed. Many buyers want to see where a product is coming from and what the processor is doing to ensure safe, high-quality raw product is used. Risk of contamination increases every…  » Read more

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Todd Koons, founder of Epic Roots, started his career in the produce industry in 1978, at the age of

Todd Koons, founder of Epic Roots, started his career in the produce industry in 1978, at the age of 19, as a pantry manager for an upscale French restaurant in San Francisco Berkeley. He spent those days on the road, purchasing fresh ingredients for the menu, including fresh lettuce for the salads. At that time, baby leaf lettuce wasn’t commercially available, so the chefs spent hours stripping off the outer leaves of large leaf lettuce to get to the small, tender leaves inside. That changed when one of the restaurant’s owners and chef traveled to Europe and discovered mesclun. She brought it back and started a small garden next to the restaurant, tended by Koons and the head chef. He left that job in the early 1980s and traveled abroad, but ended up back in California working for an urban garden in Berkeley that triple-washed baby…  » Read more

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Despite slow sales and lower traffic, operators are optimistic

The outlook for restaurants is looking up for the first time in almost a year, according to the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Performance Index. The index number for April stood at 98.6, which indicates the restaurant industry is still contracting, but the expectations component of the survey indicated expansion for the first time in 18 months, according to the association. This suggests that the restaurant industry may be heading out of the downturn experienced over the last two years. Same-store sales are still down compared to last year, with only 26 percent of restaurant operators seeing gains and 59 percent reporting negative same-store sales. Traffic also was negative for the 20th straight month, according to the index. Sixty percent of operators reported a decline in traffic in April, which was a slight improvement over the March numbers as a result of the Easter holiday falling in…  » Read more

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