Tag Archives: supermarkets

The Facebook IPO is Not the Only Game in Town

Janice | February 6, 2012 - 1:31 pm

It’s the biggest IPO in years and there will be none for you.
There’s a long line of bankers, venture capitalists, institutional investors, and well-connected individuals getting first dibs on shares of Facebook when the social media titan goes public this spring.

Less buzz, more bunny.
Why bother when you can easily buy into the initial offering from Annie’s Homegrown? When Annie’s announced plans to go public, there was none of the frenzy that surrounded recent offerings like LinkedIn, Groupon, and now Facebook. The organic mac and cheese maker doesn’t generate the same kind of heat, but unlike so many technology and social media companies, it does generate profits: in each of the last five years, Annie’s sales have grown by an average of nearly 16%; in 2011 the company reported a profit of $15 million.

Annie’s makes the second most popular macaroni and cheese, trailing only the iconic blue box from Kraft. In the natural and organic market, it’s number one for macaroni and cheese, snack crackers, fruit snacks, and graham crackers. The company makes crackers, condiments, frozen pizza, and 100 other products that can be found in 25,000 specialty and mass market locations across the U.S. and Canada. Annie’s is a premium-priced, high-margin brand with a loyal customer base that is better-educated, more health-conscious, and spends more on food than the average consumer.

Annie’s also has a cute bunny logo and a way better stock ticker symbol (BNNY) than Facebook’s (FB).

See full financials and learn about the stock offering–read the company prospectus filed with the SEC.

Posted in food business | Tagged start up, supermarkets | Leave a comment

Supermarket Waste: Where Does the Old Food Go?

Janice | January 27, 2012 - 1:23 pm

image via Scary Mommy

The out-of-date yogurt cartons, the dented cans, the misshapen potatoes that shoppers passed over.
There’s a lot of activity behind the scenes and after hours at your local supermarket. Employees strip the shelves of brown bananas, opened boxes, broken jars, and stale muffins. They take the past-peak quality produce and meats to the deli or the salad bar and recycle them into prepared foods. They also remove packaged foods approaching their expiration dates—still perfectly good, but who’s going to buy a 5-pound block of cheese with 3 days left?

The good news is that more food than ever is finding a second life.

Wholesalers and supermarket chains have set up reclamation centers that operate as clearing houses for products considered unsaleable by the stores. The centers are filled with Christmas cookies in January, Valentine’s chocolate in March, and a year-round assortment of products that are nearing their sell-by dates or have packaging that has since been updated by the manufacturer. Much of it is shipped off to dollar stores and discount grocers, two categories that have become important to the food chain in our current economic state. There you’ll find an ever-changing assortment of foods—items discontinued by manufacturers, unfamiliar regional brands, foods labelled for export, and plenty of familiar and even high-end products all offered at highly discounted prices.

Food banks are another outlet for unsaleables, and most supermarket chains and reclamation centers participate in some sort of hunger relief program. The passage of the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act encourages participation by protecting the stores and distributors from criminal or civil liability around issues of food safety. The FDA also enthusiastically supports the practice and has even emphasized that other than baby food and formula, most food expiration dates refer to the point when a product’s taste, texture, color, or nutritional benefits start to deteriorate rather than the point when you need to worry about the product’s safety.

Americans waste a lot of food—more than 40% of all we produce. According to the The Natural Resources Defense Council if we wasted just 5 percent less food, it would be enough to feed 4 million Americans; 20 percent less waste would feed 25 million. This is indefensible at a time when both food prices and the number of Americans without enough to eat continue to rise.

On his Wasted Food website, Joanathan Bloom has a lot to say about food waste and what we can do about it.

AlterNet grades the food waste handling of Wal-Mart, Safeway, and other top grocery chains.

Posted in community, shopping | Tagged shopping, supermarkets | Leave a comment

Snooping in Other People’s Pantries

Janice | January 17, 2012 - 10:40 am

Almedahls vintage pantry tea towel

It’s been said that the eyes are the window to the soul.
Nonsense. The true window to the soul is the pantry.

Every pantry tells a story.

Pantries are as individual as fingerprints. They reflect history and aspirations, politics and pocketbooks. They are links to the past and road maps to our dreams. They are the show we put on for guests and they can harbor our deepest secrets.

Pantries can be treasure troves of exotica or wastelands of deprivation. They can speak of careful planning or organized chaos. They can remind us that we are overscheduled or underpaid. And sometimes they just scream Take out the recycling!

Pantries are the place where dreams meet reality.

The online world is ripe with opportunities for a culinary peeping Tom. The best of these is a photo series, now in its fith year, called Other People’s Pantries.

Hosted on the blog The Perfect Pantry, each week a different guest blogger showcases their own pantry in photographs and text. We have peered inside of converted broom closets in tiny urban kitchens, hand-hewn shelving in log cabins, and lavishly outfitted pantry extravaganzas in grandiose homes. We have been to kitchens in nearly every state and about a dozen countries. Can by can, spice by spice, each pantry tells the story of a cook, a home, a life.

If you’re game, Other People’s Pantries is currently soliciting submissions for new pantries to feature.

Want to snoop some more?

Diane Sawyer prefers Miracle Whip to mayonnaise. Bobby Flay like to mix hot sauce into his Greek yogurt. Rachel Ray bakes with cake mixes. Celebrity secrets are revealed in Stock Your Pantry Like the Stars.

A dieting wife and mother; a restaurant critic; a 20-something ethical vegetarian; a newly-divorced middle-aged man; the Montreal Gazette dissects the shopping and eating habits of this eclectic group of home cooks in its series Shop, Cook, Eat, Drink.

What Your Groceries Say About You looks at the secret language of grocery purchases, from Jimmy Dean’s dough-wrapped frozen sausages (“I will eat anything on a stick,”) to canned Reddi Whip (“There’s an 87% chance I’m using this for sex.”)

Posted in diversions, home | Tagged kitchen, supermarkets | Leave a comment

Paying More, Getting Less: Your Incredible Shrinking Groceries

Janice | November 8, 2011 - 1:46 pm

[image via Slow Poke Comics]

Coming soon to a supermarket near you…

Two Musketeers candy bars, Demitasse-a-Soup, Product 18 cereal.
It’s not your imagination; your groceries really are shrinking. Everything but the prices.

Hellmanns’s mayonnaise, Skippy peanut butter, and Tropicana orange juice are among hundreds of national brands that have shrunk their packaging in recent months. An 8 oz. Dannon yogurt now weighs in at 6, while the 6 oz. Yoplait dropped to 4. Kellogg slimmed cereal boxes by an average of 2.4 oz., and Wrigley’s 17-stick PlenTPak is not so plenTiful at 15. Mission prefers to play a shell game with its tortillas, dropping 2 from the 10-pack, then adding 2 to the 8-pack and calling it a ‘bonus;’ kind of like the ‘extra’ hour we get for daylight savings time.

Portion reduction, short-sizing, eco-friendly packaging—whatever they want to call it, it’s just a way of flying under the radar with price increases.

At least a dozen eggs is still twelve.

We are losing our benchmarks. A pint of Häagen-Dazs is now 2 oz. shy of that measure, and the former half gallon carton of Dreyers or Breyers ice cream has taken two separate hits to get to the current 1.5 quart size. The old one pound can of Maxwell House or Folgers coffee now weighs in at around 12 oz., just like a supermarket bag of Starbucks beans, in case you thought you were getting a full pound. Some reductions are more troubling than others—it’s problematic when you can’t squeeze two decent sandwiches out of the smaller size can of Starkist tuna, while four fewer Double Stuf Oreos will hardly be missed.

It’s not that we begrudge the manufacturers their profit margins. They are feeling the squeeze, coping with the rising cost of ingredients plus high fuel prices. Holding the line on supermarket pricing through down-sized packaging can make the product more attractive to budget shoppers. What irks is the disingenuousness; the sense that the manufacturers are pulling a fast one when they tout their new ‘value-added redesign,’ or ‘slim-ship enviro-packaging.’

As the frequently resized Alice said to the Wonderland caterpillar:
I’m not particular as to size, only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.

The shoppers’ advocacy site The Consumerist will keep you up to date on shrinking grocery items with its regular feature, Grocery Shrink Ray.

Posted in food business, shopping | Tagged recession, supermarkets | 1 Comment

Is Access to Healthy Food a Basic Human Right?

Janice | October 6, 2011 - 11:23 am

Is access to healthy food a basic human right?
That’s the question being asked by California Governor Jerry Brown.

Not just food, but healthy food.
Food access is a right. That one has been with us since 1948, the result of the experience of the Second World War. At the end of that war, vowing that the world would never again see such suffering, the international community created the United Nations and drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among the various protections, guarantees, and liberties is the individual’s right to food.

Back in 1948, nobody thought to specify the type of food. When those words were written, the Big Mac was just a gleam in Roy Kroc’s eye, and the Colonel had yet to fry his first chicken. Who could have imagined a time when nutrition would be so divorced from food that malnutrition could go hand-in-hand with obesity?
This is the paradox of modern-day poverty.

It’s like the line in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
Millions of Americans are adrift in a sea of junk food. They are surrounded by cheap and abundant processed foods, with little access to healthy foods. This landscape has been dubbed ‘food deserts,’ to describe low-income communities with plenty of processed foods at convenience stores and fast food outlets, but little or no fresh food, and the nearest supermarket is one mile away if it’s an urban community, and 10 miles away if it’s rural.

The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that this is a reality for more than 20 million Americans, and 1.7 million of them are living in California. The bill on Governor Brown’s desk would create the California Healthy Food Financing Initiative. It enables the state to collaborate with public, private, and philanthropic entities to bring loan and grant financing to the under-served neighborhoods. The goal is to encourage existing businesses to expand their healthier offerings, and to attract grocery stores, food cooperatives, farmers’ markets, and other fresh food retailers.

Is access to high quality food a basic human right?
The State Assembly and the Senate in California think so; in fact they have thought so twice. The previous governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was inclined to believe that healthy food is a privilege earned by the state’s wealthier residents who own cars or live within striking distance of farmers markets; last year he vetoed a similar bill after it passed both houses of the legislature. Once again, it sits on the governor’s desk where it is a signature away from becoming law.

Find out where they are: the Economic Research Service of the USDA created a Food Desert Locator based on census tract-level data.

The Food Environment Atlas lets you go deeper into a community’s statistics, looking at factors like restaurant expenditures and meals cooked at home.

Posted in community, fast food, health + diet | Tagged government, local, supermarkets | Leave a comment

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