Food Products

General Mills, Kellogg, Toys "R" Us and other big American companies are increasing their scrutiny of thousands of everyday products they receive from Chinese suppliers, as widening recalls of items such as toys and toothpaste force them to focus on potential hazards that were overlooked in the past. These corporations are stepping up their analysis of imported goods that they sell, making more unannounced visits to Chinese factories for inspections and, in one case, pulling merchandise from American shelves at the first hint of a problem.

HUMAN BEINGS may think they rule the world, but lesser links in the food chain seem determined to strike back. With scares from tainted meet, fruit, vegetables and even unpasteurized juice, Americans are learning that a safe food supply is not something that can be taken for granted, though the United States has long enjoyed far better protections than most other countries.According to the World Health Organization, food-borne diseases may be 300 to 350 times more prevalent than the reported cases indicate.

It's a big world and somebody has to feed it.That was theme of an all-day conference at the World Trade Center yesterday as about 200 Maryland farmers, food processors and agriculture officials gathered to discuss the whys, how-tos and projected benefits of marketing food products abroad.Eugene Moos, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, captured the ears of the lunchtime audience when he said 96 percent of the world's consumers live outside the United States."Think about that," Moos said.

JP Foodservice Inc., the Columbia-based institutional food distributor that has been charting an aggressive growth strategy, announced yesterday that it has bought most of Rotelle Inc., a Pennsylvania company in the same business.The $6.2 million acquisition of Rotelle, a subsidiary of Richfoods Inc. of Richmond, Va., is part of a rapid expansion program for the cash-rich JP, which paid off much of its heavy debt load when it went public in November 1994."This company is just poised for growth.

You're not a vegetarian, aren't into aroma therapy or spray-on vitamins, and think the planet can pretty much take care of itself . . . why should you care about the Natural Products Expo?One, it's big. Nearly 800 exhibitors of such natural products as organic foods, natural fibers, homeopathic remedies, vitamins and supplements, and herbs spilled out of the main floor of the Baltimore Convention Center, filling the entry hall and the exhibit rooms upstairs. Dozens more didn't make the show for lack of space.

Robert L. Walker, Maryland's secretary of agriculture since November 1991, resigned yesterday to take a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture helping Ukrainian farmers improve production techniques and move to a free-market system.Mr. Walker has been appointed an agricultural policy adviser to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Ukraine, which was the breadbasket of the former Soviet Union. He will leave his state position in mid-April and begin his new job at the end of the month.

When a single piece of broccoli is tossed into an otherwise innocuous bowl of chopped lettuce, what's left is nothing short of a sabotaged salad. Just ask any salad-wise kid.But give that same kid a chance to decide what gets glopped onto the lettuce -- say, a pizza-flavored dressing -- well, suddenly that salad has a prayer at passing the kid test. Just ask any kid-wise marketer.In the mounting battle for the estimated $130 billion in annual product purchases that children influence, the country's big food makers are trying to entice youngsters to nag their folks for groceries that few kids have much cared about -- like salad dressings, yogurt and luncheon meats.

Supermarkets are always full of "new, improved" foodstuffs. These days, however, the most noticeable -- and welcome -- improvement in grocery stores and snack machines is not the food itself but the information on its label. Starting tomorrow, new regulations governing the labeling of food products require bigger, simpler, more informative labels that should vastly increase consumers' ability to monitor what they eat.Under the old labeling system, only about 60 percent of food products carried labels at all; now virtually all of them will.

While the new nutrition labeling law may be a good deal for health-conscious consumers, it has cost food companies more than $1 billion to comply and has left many companies with useless inventories of containers and labels.But some food processors are preparing to mount a last-ditch effort tomorrow with the possible filing of a case in U.S. District Court in Washington to stop the law's enforcement, set to begin Sunday."The impact is just tremendous," said Washington attorney Michael R. Cershow, who represents the aluminum can companies that plan to file suit.

McCormick & Co. Inc.'s annual meeting yesterday came on the heels of strong first-quarter earnings announced earlier this week, but McCormick executives were not in a self-congratulatory mood, largely because the company's stock has not kept pace."

Even if the price of oil falls, the governor should launch a full-fledged sustainability effort to promote an expansion of farming here and the production of more Maryland food for Marylanders. In fact, all the governors of the Chesapeake watershed should work up a 20-year strategic plan to expand agriculture and environmental education, create more farming opportunities for a new generation of growers, promote more aquaculture and organic farming, and create regional networks for getting local food to consumers.

General Mills, Kellogg, Toys "R" Us and other big American companies are increasing their scrutiny of thousands of everyday products they receive from Chinese suppliers, as widening recalls of items such as toys and toothpaste force them to focus on potential hazards that were overlooked in the past. These corporations are stepping up their analysis of imported goods that they sell, making more unannounced visits to Chinese factories for inspections and, in one case, pulling merchandise from American shelves at the first hint of a problem.

WASHINGTON -- Consumers have become more concerned about food safety and want to know more about the groceries they buy, a new survey reveals. Nearly 70 percent of more than 1,600 consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom surveyed in February expressed a low level of trust in the claims that branded food products make about their environmental impact and health benefits. The study also found that almost half of consumers are more concerned about food safety now than they were two years ago. "Quite honestly, we were very surprised at the strength of some of the results that came out the survey," said Guy Blisset, consumer products lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value, which conducted the survey.

Martin J. Tulkoff, chairman of the board of Tulkoff Food Products Inc., whose "Flaming Hot" horseradish has been raising the heat on sandwiches and clearing the sinuses of Baltimoreans for three decades, died of lung cancer Saturday at his Pikesville home. He was 73. Mr. Tulkoff was born in Baltimore to Harry and Lena Tulkoff, Russian immigrants who settled in the city in the early 1920s. He spent his early years above his parents' produce business - the New York Fruit Co. - in a building at 1018 E. Lombard St., in the city's Corned Beef Row neighborhood.

Columbia-based Martek Biosciences Corp. said yesterday that while it suffered a huge drop in fourth-quarter profit because of changes in its manufacturing division, the nutritional supplement maker still posted a 16 percent increase in annual income, thanks to strong sales of ingredients used in baby formula. Income for the fiscal quarter that ended Oct. 31 was $641,000, an 87 percent fall from $4.9 million recorded during the fourth quarter of 2005. Executives blamed the decrease on a $4.7 million charge associated with restructuring of plants in Kentucky and South Carolina that led Martek to cut 100 workers -- 15 percent of its staff.

The American hemp-food industry has been given an 11th-hour reprieve by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which has decided to delay by 40 days its enforcement of rules barring the sale of foods containing THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, DEA spokesman Will Glaspy says. In October, the DEA had set Thursday as the deadline for stores to remove from their shelves all food products made with hempseed or hempseed oil, which contain trace amounts of THC. The DEA has not claimed that the foods - including waffles, snack chips and salad oil - cause intoxication, only that the law sets no standard for allowable amounts of THC. The ruling does not apply to soaps or cosmetics made with hemp.

She has his famous cool blue eyes. His love of fly-fishing. His passion for race cars. His business savvy. And his generous spirit. Nell Newman, daughter of Paul -- as in Butch Cassidy, as in Cool Hand Luke, as in heart-throb actor-director -- is very much her father's daughter. Yet very much her own person. The 42-year-old may have shrugged off acting, but she followed in Dad's footsteps in another way -- by establishing and running Newman's Own Organics, The Second Generation, a division of his Newman's Own specialty food products company.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Colleen Chapin calls herself a food detective. You didn't know there's a problem with missing food? There is. Somewhere in the Midwest, a housewife misses Bre'r Rabbit Molasses. A father in California dreams of eating Frankenberry cereal one more time. And a baby boomer in New England wistfully recalls the long-lost Sky Bar. These reunions are now possible with the click of a mouse. Chapin has tracked down these products and more. Her Web site, www.hometownfavorites.

HUMAN BEINGS may think they rule the world, but lesser links in the food chain seem determined to strike back. With scares from tainted meet, fruit, vegetables and even unpasteurized juice, Americans are learning that a safe food supply is not something that can be taken for granted, though the United States has long enjoyed far better protections than most other countries.According to the World Health Organization, food-borne diseases may be 300 to 350 times more prevalent than the reported cases indicate.

It's a big world and somebody has to feed it.That was theme of an all-day conference at the World Trade Center yesterday as about 200 Maryland farmers, food processors and agriculture officials gathered to discuss the whys, how-tos and projected benefits of marketing food products abroad.Eugene Moos, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, captured the ears of the lunchtime audience when he said 96 percent of the world's consumers live outside the United States."Think about that," Moos said.