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FOODIES FOCUS KITCHENWARE NEWS & HOUSEWARES REVIEW n AUGUST 2018 n www.kitchenwarenews.com 20 Your Heart' program almost two years ago," says Daisy Freund, Director of Farm Animal Welfare Strategy and Campaigns for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). "Before that, we were doing surveys and realizing that people were super confused. They were saying, 'I eat animal products, but I want to do the right thing,' and that's why we created Shop with Your Heart." ASPCA highlights three certifications, Freund says Certified Humane, Animal Welfare Approved and GAP step 2 and above. The three vary in their levels of welfare, but all have on-farm welfare standards developed by scientists and veterinarians, and all require independent on-farm audits. Consumers can visit www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consume r-resources to find dozens of animal-welfare certified brands of animal products available in local supermarkets as well as online. There's a section on the website where Customers have to ask "what's important to me?," he says. "In my opinion, you get the best product from an animal that was happiest on its last day. That's how I make my decisions." The general public must agree, says the ASPCA's Freund, "because we're seeing a pretty big uptick in numbers of animals certified under one of these programs." In 2015, Certified Humane, Global Animal Partnership and Animal Welfare Approved collectively certified the welfare of around 393 million animals, she says. In 2016 that number rose to about 440 million. "That's about five percent of the market," she says. " We have seen a ton of major commitments among poultry producers to become GAP certified, and we're going to see a big surge in commitments in the next five or six years, especially in the broiler- fryer space." GAP's Letton says those commitments are coming through its Better Chicken grocers and restaurateurs can learn how to connect with certified providers, too. Consumers Driving the Demand "In 2016, we surveyed a thousand people and found that 74 percent were paying more attention to labels than they had been five years previously," Freund said. " We saw, across the board, really high levels of concern, and that was driving interest in that labeling." Chef Ryan Farr of San Francisco, California, started 4505 Chicharrones because of his interest in nose-to-tail eating. Being able to label his company's products as humanely raised was one of his founding principles, he says. "Animal Welfare Approved is a really great certification," he says. "It's not that easy to achieve. It's important to know the story of the maker, and that includes knowing what the farmers' practices are. What are the animals fed? How far do they have to travel to slaughter?" Initiative, which promises to reverse the overbreeding of the classic Cornish-Rock cross birds that have been selectively bred to grow so fast and so big that the animals suffer health problems even before they're slaughtered. Working with the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada, GAP is working to introduce slower-growing birds that won't suffer such health problems but can still provide profits for growers. "We're already getting commitments to make the improvements by 2024," she says. Among those who have already signed: Perdue, Sodexo, Starbucks, Nestle, Campbell's and Subway. For now, though, California shopper Barnard says she looks to familiar certifications. "I look for Certified Humane certification," says Barnard, who lives in San Marcos. "But I think the best one is the Certified Animal Welfare Approved label." KN Consumer Concerns… (cont. from Page 18) Part of it's about being healthy, but a lot of it's a values journey,"said Glenn Rudberg, Chief Marketing Officer of Ethos Marketing, which provides marketing advice to the consumer packaged goods industry. "It used to be that good marketers forgot their values and focused on their ingredients.... Now consumers want to know where their brands stand. You can't be in the middle anymore." "Consumers want that connection. They want that transparency. They want to know what they're buying," he continued. "They support small. They're distrustful of large. They 're somewhat distrustful of government. They're wanting brands that can connect to them on a personal level." The consumer packaged goods industry is transforming the foods they're offering to grocers to comply with those consumer demands, Rudberg said. "Chobani, for instance, is trying to speak to a consumer at a higher level than just putting 'Blueberry' on a package. Smoothie King is reformulating the line. They 're reinventing their business," he said. "You're seeing brands reformulating with pure maple syrup rather than maple flavor.... You know that these larger brands are starting to take notice.... Campbell Soup is heeding the warning and recasting their tried and true recipes, moving towards cleaner food. You know that it's hitting the mainstream." The Consumer Point of View Consumers may couch their broad concerns about food in the language of health and wellness, sustainability or transparency, and part of the problem is that those terms themselves mean many different things to different people. For grocery retailers, the definition of 'sustainable' is making sure that they have the ability to source f rom what they're reading on the labels." Sometimes the problem is just that consumers don't understand some of the acronyms and jargon they're reading on the labels – they might think that the "G" in "GMO" has something to do with gluten because they may not know what either of those terms actually means, but they know they 've heard about both of them as something to avoid, she said. She explains to them that sometimes what 's most important is that they look beyond the confusing label claims to consider the essential identity of the product they're considering. "A non-GMO, gluten-f ree corn dog is still a corn dog," she said. The View from the Supply Side According to the Specialty Food Association, in its 2017 report on the state of the specialty food industry, claims of sustainability are getting more attention f rom the supply chain. Close to 40 percent of manufacturers were producing sustainable products as of the 2017 report, up f rom 22 percent in the previous year. "Among retailers, sustainable products accounted for 16 percent of product sales, and share increased notably this year," according to the report, which predicted that "sustainable" will be the claim most interesting to consumers in the next three years. Manufacturers are still working hard to come up with label language that consumers can understand and that will appeal to them as they're making their purchasing decisions, according to Severin Weiss, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of SpecPage, which is in the business of providing innovative solutions for the recipe-based manufacturing industry. "We have seen in the past that ingredients lists were sometimes too their suppliers for extended periods of time, ideally in perpetuity, said Andy Harig, Senior Director, Sustainability, Tax & Trade at the Food Marketing Institute. "Farmers have been focused on that since time began. They are much more attuned to the impacts of weather and climate change, he said. But for the consumer, especially the Millennial consumer, sustainability might have something to do with how the farmer and the grocer treats their work force or how the rancher and the processor treat the animals that are the sources of protein, eggs and dairy products. "We're seeing the definition of sustainability broadening out into corporate and social responsibility. It's a broader view, and it's a view that every aspect of the supply chain needs to be taken into account and needs to be sustainable," Harig said. "Supply chains that depend on exploitation of individuals are not just a matter of conscience but also a matter of economic sustainability. There's an emerging view of what the term encompasses, driven in part by the Millennials, who have grown up with the idea of sustainability at the foref ront of consciousness. It's something they expect to be embraced." While manufacturers are struggling to provide transparency by including more information on their product labels and moving information that consumers say is particularly important to them to the front of the label, those labels themselves sometimes leave consumers with more questions than answers, according to Leah McGrath, a supermarket dietitian who finds herself at the other end of some of those questions. "Some people are confused and concerned," she said. "They don't know what they should be paying attention to, what they should be avoiding. A lot of them have a lot of concern and guilt about complicated for consumers to understand," he said. "We're now seeing labels with four ingredients, so you don't have to be super- educated to understand all the chemical components." He advises manufacturers to provide on their labels the basic information that consumers want and will understand – a few ingredients, allergy information and country of origin along with the nutrition information mandated by the government. "That builds trust because it is complete information that he is looking for – it's not just an ingredient list that he doesn't understand at all." He suggests also that manufacturers use images wisely, on every medium in which they're attempting to communicate with their customers, since today's technology- savvy consumers are becoming more visual, and they use pictures as a source of information to an extent that hasn't always been true. "There are only a few catalogs that have really good pictures, and the picture really speaks to the consumers," he said. "Technology today is available, and depending on the device, he needs to have an optimized picture. The picture has to work on a mobile device, and it has to be informative." "If I look at how I choose consumer products, it can be hard to read the data sheet, and then how can you trust the data?" he continued. "Nice picture, clean label, all the information that the consumer is looking for, including nutrition, allergy, country of origin – that builds a lot of trust.... If a consumer sees a label with the information that it's produced at the farm around the corner, that's a different level of information f rom 'Produced in the U.S.' 'Produced at an organic farm in Oregon' – that's a different message, and that message builds trust." KN Peering into the Haze… (cont. from Page 18)

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