Food Marketing Expense

Seventy percent of food manufacturers’ marketing budgets goes to trade promotion fees, which is money paid to supermarkets to obtain better product placement and promotion. The other thirty percent is for advertising and product packaging.


Brand awareness only goes so far and packaging, a fine art, is used to entice us to buy, but ultimately we are swayed by what is in front of us. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder and we buy what we see first in the store.

Safe to Eat Foods

OK, it is Christmas and food is on my mind. I found this interesting. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151029-are-any-foods-safe-to-eat-anymore-heres-the-truth

Ten Weird Fast Foods

Here are a few weird fast food menu items from around the world.
1. Pork and seaweed doughnut (Dunkin' Donuts China)
2. Darth Vader burger (Quick, France) all black bun
3. Kimchi croquettes (Dunkin' Donuts Korea) made with real kimchi
4. Bacon Potato Pie (McDonald’s Japan) mashed potatoes and bacon deep-fried in the familiar apple pie shell Mmmm!
5. Shrimp burger (McDonald’s Japan) fried shrimp patty
6. Chicken Nugget burger (Burger King, Poland) ground chicken with curry sauce
7. Coffee Jelly Frappuccino (Starbucks, Japan) a regular Starbucks Frappuccino (frozen coffee drink) with coffee jelly, made from actual brewed coffee.
8. Cheese and marmite panini (Starbucks UK) Marmite is a brown, sticky spread made from yeast byproduct.
9. Tuna Pie (Jollibee, Phillipines) the tuna, pie comes stuffed with cooked tuna and vegetables
10. Winter double king pizza (Pizza Hut, Japan) a pizza topped with mayonnaise, king crab, shrimp, beef, broccoli, onion, corn, egg, and potato and a removable crust made of fried, mayonnaise-stuffed shrimp that look like little pigs in blankets.
Jollibees is a chicken and burger franchise like McDonalds. It is also in a number of states including California, New York, and Nevada. Mascot is Jolly bee.

Calories and calories

Deserts do not have Calories, but desserts do. Of course, getting your just deserts means getting what you deserve. So getting your deserts and getting your desserts might be the same thing. No wonder there is such confusion about the words.

Calories share the same type of confusion. A calorie is a unit of measure required to increase the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. A food Calorie is actually 1,000 calories compared to calories in chemistry. Usually calories are spelled with a small "c" and food Calories spelled with capital "C".

Food Calories are counted,  according to the National Data Lab, based on an indirect calorie estimation made using the Atwater system. The total caloric value is calculated by adding up the calories provided by the energy-containing nutrients: protein, carbohydrate, fat and alcohol. Because carbohydrates contain some fiber that is not digested and utilized by the body, the fiber component is usually subtracted from the total carbohydrate before calculating calories. The label on a food item that contains 10 g of protein, 20 g of carbohydrate and 9 g of fat would read 201 kcals or Calories.

Nine Interesting Food Facts

1 Apple is made of 25% air, that is why they float.
2 Avocado has the highest protein and oil content of all fruits.
3 Carrots were originally purple in color, changing in the 17th Century to orange with newer varieties.
4 Cherries are a member of the rose family.
5 Corn always has an even number of ears. It only makes up about 8% of the weight in a box of corn flakes.
6 Honey is the only edible food for humans that will never go bad.
7 Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries.
8 Peanuts are one of the ingredients in dynamite.
9 Pear is a fruit that ripens from the inside out.

Foods From the Fifties

Did you ever wonder how long some things have been around?
 -
1950
Sugar Pops (Kelloggs)
Minute Rice (General Foods)
Lawry's Seasoned Salt (Lawry's)
Dunkin' Doughnuts (fast food chain)

1951
Ore-Ida Foods (frozen potato products)
Duncan Hines Cake Mix (Nebraska Consolidated Mills)
Tropicana Products (Florida orange juice)
Jack-in-the-Box (fast food chain restaurant)
Taco Bell (fast food mexican restaurant)

1952
No-Cal Ginger Ale (Kirsch Beverages)
Sugar Frosted Flakes (Kellogg's)
Non-dairy creamer (M & R. Dietetic Laboratories)
Dehydrated onion soup mix (Lipton)
Ms. Paul's Fish Sticks

Green Checkmark

You will soon see them on food and cereal boxes in your local supermarket and in future commercials touting that these green checkmarks are designed to "to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices.”

It is part of a new 'Smart Choices campaign' and the types of foods that have been approved are Fruit Loops and Cocoa Krispies.

Ten companies have signed up for the Smart Choices program including Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods. Companies that participate pay up to $100,000 a year to the program, with the fee based on total sales of its products that bear the seal.

Members of these companies have people on the Smart Choices board. Hmmm! Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, was part of a panel that helped devise the Smart Choices nutritional criteria, until he quit last September. He said the panel was dominated by members of the food industry, which skewed its decisions.

So we have an industry creating a self-serving ranking system, with a Board of their own members to make decisions, for companies who all stand to gain a big profit from this. Sounds like green checks are the new green stamps, but with no value.

Boston Butt

Don’t be too grossed out when you hear this name; it doesn’t mean “butt” as in “rear end” - the cut actually comes from the front shoulder of the pig.

During colonial days New England butchers tended to take less prized cuts of pork like these and pack them into barrels for storage and transport. The barrels the pork went into were called butts. This particular shoulder cut became known around the country as a New England specialty, and hence it became the “Boston butt.” Interesting that this name is not used in Boston. A hogshead is 64.8 US gallons and butt it equal to two US hogsheads or 126 US gallons.

Chicken and Egg Solved

According to Genesis 1:20-22 the chicken came before the egg. "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that hath life. . . It doesn't say, "Let there be eggs."

Potato Chips are sooo Good

True - Oklahoma City resident Lahuma Smith, pled no contest to prostitution charges that she traded sex for a box of Frito-Lay potato chips.

According to the police report, undercover officers noticed Smith was flashing her headlights to 'catch' a date. They followed her car and found her with her blouse open and a man in the passenger seat pulling his pants up.

The man told police he was having marital problems and she told police the man said he was looking for company, but he didn’t have any money, so she agreed to be paid with a $30 case of Frito-Lay chips he had in his car. As much as I love potato chips, this one is not right. . . and they weren't even Better Made or Granny Goose potato chips.

M&Ms

M & M's were developed so that soldiers could eat candy without getting their fingers sticky.

Bananas

The banana fruit is a berry and does not grow on a tree, but actually grows on the world's largest herb and is a member of the lily family.

Scientists at the Texas A&M University's institute for biosciences and technology are working on ways to grow vaccines inside bananas.

Chocolate Sniff

A new way of eating chocolate - by breathing it.

Chocolate without the calories is yours if you inhale chocolate when Le Whif goes on sale later this month in four luscious flavors: mint chocolate, raspberry chocolate, mango chocolate, and plain chocolate. I'll have my coffee with a sniff.

Orange Juice Truths

OJ is heavily processed and heavily engineered. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize.

Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for over a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies, such as Tropicana, hire flavor companies to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. These are orange-derived substances, essences, and oils. Flavor companies break down the essence and oils into individual chemicals and recombine them. Most concentrate (even Tropicana) comes from Brazil, not Florida.

People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it is not and sits in storage for quite a long time.

BTW - Minute Maid is owned by Coca-Cola. Tropicana is owned by Pepsi.

Speaking of Breakfast

When it comes time for my birthday, I hope someone keeps this web site in mind. It is a bacon-of-the-month club gifts.
How better to tell that certain someone that you are thinking of them every month of the year. Bobby Flay's father bought him a one year subscription. Bacon is almost as good as potato chips. OK, OK, sorry. I just had to do it.

P E T A

I am a member and you can become a member, too. It stands for People Eating Tasty Animals. You don't eat meat when it turns green, because it will make you sick, so why would you eat anything that starts out green.

Got Salt

Our bodies need salt to function, but an interesting tidbit many do not know is that salt stimulates a pleasant sensation in the brain, according to a new study by the University of Iowa. Salt deprivation is one of the symptoms associated with depression. There are many long and involved studies show the goodness of salt and overuse leading to other health problems. I'll leave them for another day.
Other things from salt - The salt shaker ministries in Kentucky, the word salary comes from the Greek word for salt, one of the four taste sensations is saltiness (along with sweet, bitter, and sour), Roman soldiers were paid in salt. Taking a dip in the Dead Sea is good for healing psoriasis.

(A fifth, less often mentioned taste sensation is Umami is a whole new sensual pleasure. It is a multidimensional taste sensation that is not only savory, brothy and mouth filling but actually interacts with the other taste receptors, think of MSG, and fermented fish sauces, such as Worcestershire. It is a powerful taste that we have known since we were a baby, yet its mysterious interaction with other taste receptors make it hard to describe.)

Old wives' tale - Salt does raise water's boiling point, but you would need a full ounce per quart to raise it one degree.

Sea salt and table salt have the same nutritional value, but taste different because of other chemicals. Sea salt has more calcium, magnesium, and potassium. Did you know table salt has iodine and additives that prevent it from caking, like it did in the old days? I am not ready to start salting my bacon, but I like salt, because it makes me feel good. Bottom line: just like many other things that make you feel good - use it, but don't abuse it.