Oser Communications Group

BY LORRIE BAUMANN America's Latin food producers are banding together to speak out in support of an industry that contributes more than $2 trillion a year to the U.S. economy. "This is a very appropriate time and maybe past an appropriate time," said David Lizárraga, who sits on the board of directors of the newly formed Latino Food In- dustry Association. "We estab- lished it to bring people together and to promote, support and ed- ucate the thousands of Latino owners, employees and entrepre- neurs who are involved in every aspect of the country's rapidly Latin Food Businesses Unite to Advocate for Their Industry Continued on PAGE 8 Continued on PAGE 10 Continued on PAGE 14 growing food and beverage indus- try." The organization launched first in Los Angeles, California, and is currently working on taking the organization national. "We had the launch and received a tremen- dous response from all over the U.S. from people who see this as a need," Lizárraga said. "If you build it, they will come," added Robert Alaniz, a spokesman for the organization, which already has about 1,800 members. "The phones have been ringing at our headquarters ever since we announced the launch, and many of the calls are coming from the East Coast and the Mid- west." The new organization has am- bitious plans to provide educa- tional opportunities, networking opportunities and advocacy for small and medium-size busi- nesses in the Latin food industry. "It's important when cities decide to raise taxes to be there and let them know how it impacts small and medium-size businesses and employment," said Lizárraga, who is the founder of Tamayo's Mexican restaurant in Los Ange- les. He is also the founder of the TELACU Education Foundation in addition to his responsibilities to the LFIA board. The organization began coming together about a year ago with the documentation to apply for fed- eral status as a nonprofit organi- zation, and with the 501(c)3 nonprofit status secured, is now recruiting members from among food producers and the market chains that depend on them. "There's tremendous interest in providing the products, not just that the Latino community needs, but that the overall community wants to buy," Lizárraga said. "We're working with them so that Warming Planet Threatens Food Supply The Profit Potential in Food Waste Reduction BY LORRIE BAUMANN Consumer concern about wasted food presents grocers with an op- portunity to join their customers on the right side of the conversa- tion, according to Doug Rauch, Founder of The Daily Table and former CEO of Trader Joe's. "Gro- cery chains are sometimes ac- cused of having a strong vested interest in consumers wasting food. We fundamentally disagree with this view," he said. "This is an opportunity to get on the right side and get out in front of your customers." The problem of wasted food is getting a lot of media attention, which means that your customers have heard about the issue and many of them are concerned about it. A 2015 consumer survey found that almost half of respon- dents said they'd heard or seen something about wasted food in the past year. Al- most half of the 6,700 adults who were surveyed were aware that it's estimated that about 40 percent of the food pro- duced in the United States is wasted. "It's not just Millennials who care about the environment and all those other values. People are really relating around what they care about," Rauch said. "Thirty nine percent of Ameri- cans are 'aspirationals,' people who care about doing something good. That's the biggest proportion of the market- place, and those people are advocates about issues like food waste. ... If we want to keep in front of our customers, we need to be think- ing about that, because they're going to be asking about and re- quiring action on this." According to a 2017 estimate BY LORRIE BAUMANN Better packaging has been iden- tified as a key to minimizing food waste, and high pressure processing is a technology that's coming to the rescue. High pres- sure processing is a cold pas- teurization process that uses cold pressure rather than heat to kill pathogens. High pressure processing is most often used to process bev- erages, meats, poultry and seafood and also a variety of Continued on PAGE 13 Processing Foods Under Pressure Adds to Their Allure fruit and vegetable-based prod- ucts like dips and spreads. Al- though the technology has existed since the late 19th cen- tury, it's only been commercially used for food production sine the 1990s, according to Nali Pr- chal, a Senior Food Technolo- gist with Avure HPP/JBT, a high pressure processing equipment manufacturer. The company also operates a laboratory that BY LORRIE BAUMANN Climate change is real – the un- certainty among scientists is no longer about whether the Earth is warming but about what's going to happen as a result. Climate change is considered to be a threat to livestock production worldwide due to potential im- pacts on the quality of feed and forage crops, water availability, livestock diseases and the effects of heat on animal metabolism that could mean smaller animals that are more expensive to raise. "Among climate scientists, there's a very strong consensus that not only is the climate chang- ing but that the changes we are seeing go beyond what could be expected through natural activity alone," said James Hurrell, Direc- tor of the National Center for At- mospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado. "I think it is a very seri- ous issue that we have to take into account in our planning in many different ways." Scientists have been discussing the effects of human activity on our planet's climate since as far back as 1896, when Swedish physical chemist Svante August Arrhenius began publishing pa- pers discussing his theories about VOLUME 82, NUMBER 10 OCTOBER 2017 n $7.00 NEWS & NOTES n Supermarkets Pitch in for Hurricane Harvey Relief PAGE 6 RETAILER NEWS n Kroger Announces Retirement of Jayne Homco, Promotes Scott Hays PAGE 12 SUPPLIER NEWS n Tara Kirch Rejoins Best Cheese Corporation PAGE 13 NATURALLY HEALTHY n Scientists Studying Health Promoting Potential Of Mangos PAGE 16 HOT PRODUCTS n Cento Fine Foods PAGE 22 News ..............................................6 Ad Index .......................................23 Calendar.......................................23 www.gourmetnews.com G OURMET N EWS T H E B U S I N E S S N E W S P A P E R F O R T H E G O U R M E T I N D U S T R Y ® SUPPLEMENT: Pasta, Grains & Sauces SEE PAGE 17 NATURALLY HEALTHY: True Story Deli Meats SEE PAGE 15 RETAILER PROFILE: Ashland Food Co-op SEE PAGE 12

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