Food and Contamination

By Kat M. A year after the infamous ‘horsemeat scandal’ the UK is in the midst of another food health scare, chickens contaminated with the food bug campylobacter. The Food Standards Agency will publish rates of contamination for each supermarket chain. The industry is bracing itself for the results to be significantly worse than those […]

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Better Foods = More Water-Intensive Foods?

By Dave Uppal In our class on Whole Foods, we discussed the importance of moving our population toward a healthier diet. Students talked about how they felt better when they ate food they bought at Whole Foods and how we could solve a lot of public health crises by eating better. I decided to look […]

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Increasing Animal Insight in the U.S. Beef Value Chain

By Wyatt Smith In IdentiGEN, we learned about a business model presenting substantial opportunity for increasing information on U.S. meat products, but success in penetrating the market. Growing up on a cow/calf beef production operation in Alabama, I developed early interest in the U.S. beef industry and appreciated the opportunity to comment in class about […]

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Ignorance is bliss – food crises and why more changes are necessary

By Laura The phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’ from the IndentiGEN case discussion stuck in my head. In the US it is not unusual for chicken to be washed in ammonia or cattle to be fed poultry litter – all in the name of satisfying the market demand for huge quantities of meat, at rock bottom […]

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Food Security and Agricultural Sustainability Should be Governed at the Supranational Level

By Anonymous Access to a sustainable food supply that conforms to basic health standards should be a right of every person, regardless of nationality or wealth. To date, there is no substantial international governmental organization that has authority to coordinate global food security or supply regulation. Due to this vacuum in international governance, some IGOs […]

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IdentiGEN – Insurance for your Supply Chain

By Jesse In our discussion of IdentiGEN and their go to market strategy we identified three main players with which they could align themselves: regulators, trade associations, individual companies. IdentiGEN appeared to want to resist playing on the side of the regulator and preferred to align with companies. They brought their value to the beef […]

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Too many mouths to feed?

By Bret As we discussed at the end of the Yara International case (timely given it was our last class before Thanksgiving), the growth in the availability of food and the size of the population are fundamentally intertwined. Though Thomas Malthus believed that exponential population growth would be undercut and constrained by arithmetic food growth, […]

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In Defense of Food Policy

By Meena Our series of cases on food supply chain resonated with me, and I find them particularly relevant to the larger topics in energy and environment that we have discussed. Food has always been a central part of tradition and family life across cultures. While innovation in preparation and packaging have certainly broadened the […]

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Wal-Mart versus Whole Foods: why “cheap” beats “highest quality organic” as a more impactful corporate value

By Anonymous Wal-Mart is a corporate juggernaut much more likely to be singled out as a bad corporate citizen – for closing a store to prevent unionization [1] or for paying its workers below poverty levels and effectively being subsidized by state and federal aid [2] – than for using its massive scale, efficient supply […]

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Whole Foods: do “values matter”?

By Carl I stopped by Whole Foods on Tuesday and saw their new marketing banners plastered around the store: “Values Matter” they say. In class we had a heated argument on this topic, particularly on whether Whole Foods was even still adhering to the values upon which they were founded. I argue they have held […]

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