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US NFPA launches safe food web site
Europeans slash four of five GM crop trials
Key information highways are social, not physical
Wrigley chews up competition
MeadWestvaco loses 38 cents/ share for 1Q2003
Sonoco wraps up down under
Developers hit by world events
UK gives £1.3m for alternative medicine research
Fat cell receptor revealed
Breeders adapt soy to US tastes
Grow your own hydrogen fuel
Dixie’s To-Go range takes it away
Tyson Foods to close Maryland chicken plant
Food safety
US NFPA
launches safe food web site
The US’s food processing industry
association, the National Food Processors Association (NFPA), has set up a
web site to give consumers practical advice, interesting facts, and simply
stated background information on food topics in the news.
The web site, at www.safefood.org,
has 13 information sheets on topics such as food allergies, irradiation,
labelling, food safety and obesity.
The industry has drawn criticism in
the past for encouraging Americans to eat more. This may be the start of a
shift towards eating better.
GM
Europeans
slash four of five GM crop trials
Four out of five genetically
modified (GM) crop trials in Europe are no longer running, according to a
new report from the European Science and Technology Observatory.
The report shows that field-based
trials have fallen by almost 80 percent since 1998. This is due mainly to
negative consumer attitudes that led to a moratorium on approvals of new
trials, as well as legal uncertainty about ownership of the intellectual
property arising from the trials.
Even so, the next five years will
see the development and marketing of herbicide-tolerant maize, oilseed
rape, soybeans, and sugar beet; insect-resistant maize, and potatoes; and
modified starch or fatty acid content in potatoes, soybeans, and oilseed
rape.
Ten years from now will show more
varied modification of the nutrient content of key crops, and the
development of fungi-resistant and virus-resistant varieties.
The report is at http://www.jrc.es/gmoreview.pdf.
Research
Key
information highways are social, not physical
The most critical networks in any
organisation are not necessarily the ones carrying Internet traffic, but
the social networks among persons and groups that define an organization's
process and knowledge flow.
At least, that’s what researchers
who have just attracted $4 million in funding from the US National Science
Foundation (NSF) believe.
The NSF is funding eight projects
under the Management of Knowledge Intensive Dynamic Systems (MKIDS)
programme. The aim is to see how information technologies can streamline
processes for organisations that must respond rapidly to incoming
knowledge, dynamic situations and uncertainty. These include news media,
multinational research corporations, global finance institutions and the
intelligence community.
One project hopes to estimate the
size, shape and weaknesses of those social networks to help managers
predict how an organisation is likely to respond to change. Another hopes
to design organisations with no weaknesses at all.
Others include developing ways to
represent, store and share knowledge derived by the systems, ensuring the
systems can scale to global organisations, learning ill-defined workflow
rules, allowing managers to participate in distributed decision-making,
and developing innovative metrics and monitoring methods to evaluate
performance.
Finance
Wrigley
chews up competition
US chewing gum maker Wm Wrigley’s
first quarter 2003 sales rose 12 percent to $672 million on a worldwide
unit volume gain of four percent mainly from Europe and the US. Net
earnings for the quarter were $0.43 per share, up $0.05 or 13 percent.
MeadWestvaco
loses 38 cents/ share for 1Q2003
US-based packaging company
MeadWestvaco has reported a net loss of $76 million, or 38 cents per share
in the first quarter of 2003. This includes a charge of two cents per
share due to accounting changes
Net sales for the first quarter
were $1.69 billion on weaker demand in most of the company's markets.
Energy and raw materials costs were higher.
M&A
Sonoco
wraps up down under
Global packaging company Sonoco has
bought the $1.5 million/year Australian Tube Company (ATC), a privately
held manufacturer of paper-based tubes and cores, for an undisclosed sum.
Sonoco intends to consolidate operations at ATC’s Revsby factory in New
South Wales, with its facilities in nearby Ingleburn.
NPD - 1
Developers
hit by world events
New product developers are not
immune to world events and need to take them into account in their work,
says diet supplements boss Loren Israelsen.
“New product development is often
seen as a ‘behind closed doors,’ secretive process insulated from
politics, world events and regulators. However, at no time in recent
memory has it become more important for R&D teams to be aware of and
consider the impact of big picture issues,” he says.
He reckons developers need to
monitor the following items as part of the new product development
process.
Bioterrorism.
New US legislation in the wake of 9/11 will likely have a dramatic and
long-term effect on the ability to source and import new ingredients from
overseas.
Proposition 65.
“It really means 65 ways to ruin your new product launch in
California,” says Israelsen. Increased vigilance in selection and
analysis of raw materials must be Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for
all companies.
FTC’s weight loss campaign.
The Federal Trade Commission’s move to crack down on false and
misleading claims with respect to weight loss products means processors
will have to make a very careful review of the safety and substantiation
for the ingredients driving such claims.
GRAS.
Manufacturers hit by the sharp decline in dietary supplement (DS) sales
may be tempted to offer dietary ingredients as new functional food
ingredients. But this risks breaching laws that say they cannot be sold in
foods unless they already generally recognised as safe (GRAS) or affirmed
as GRAS. Hence a GRAS checklist should be a part of all new product
development.
Funding
UK gives £1.3m
for alternative medicine research
The British government is to give
researchers GBP1.3 million to explore the benefits of complementary
therapy and alternative medicines such as acupuncture and homeopathy in
treating cancer, asthma, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Public health minister Hazel Blears
said that as more people use alternative therapies, "the development
of a solid evidence base for complementary and alternative medicine is
important."
Obesity
Fat cell
receptor revealed
A cellular receptor that balances
the accumulation of fat and fat burning in the body has been discovered by
Salk Institute researchers, says a study published in Cell.
The receptor, PPARd, was found to
regulate how the body uses fat and could point the way to new treatments
for obesity and its associated complications: type II diabetes,
cardiovascular disease, hypertension and atherosclerosis.
Stimulating PPARd (short for
peroxisome proliferators-activated receptor) depleted fat deposits in
mice, while mice deficient in PPARd were prone to obesity.
The body stores excess calories in
fat tissue for future use. Fat is released and consumed when energy is
needed, such as from exercise or shivering from cold exposure. PPARd is an
important regulator of this function. By exploiting this, the researcher
hope to design drugs that can control how much fat is stored in the body.
Obesity is officially an epidemic
in the US. About 65 percent of Americans are thought overweight, and one
in five is obese in some states.
NPD - 2
Breeders
adapt soy to US tastes
As the health benefits of soy
become better known, an Arkansas researcher is trying to adapt the bean to
the sweeter taste preferred by Americans.
University of Arkansas assistant
professor Pengyin Chen has mined the USDA soybean germplasm collection for
genes that he uses to breed specialised beans adapted to Arkansas.
He has already produced larger and
smaller beans. The larger soybeans are preferred for products such as
tofu, miso (a paste made from soybean and rice), soy nuts and soy milk.
The smaller beans are desired for making natto (a Japanese food made of
fermented soybeans) and bean sprouts.
He is now working on selections for
appropriate maturity, disease resistance, and resistance to lodging and
shattering. Other projects look to varying colour (chocolate-coloured
beans, for example, are desirable for soy nuts), increasing protein
content and adjusting flavour to match Western tastes.
"We know the genes that
produce the 'beany' flavour preferred in the Orient, but disliked in
Western cultures," Chen said.
"By reducing this flavour and
increasing the sucrose content, to produce a sweeter bean, we can develop
a specialty bean for soy products that suit American tastes."
Energy
Grow your
own hydrogen fuel
Environmentally friendly hydrogen
powered fuel cells have taken a century to catch on, at least partly
because of the flaming legacy of explosive disasters like the Hindenburg.
But news that you may soon be able
to grow your own hydrogen may change that.
A research team at the US National
Energy Technology Laboratory is using bacteria to produce a gas that is 80
percent hydrogen.
When burned, hydrogen produces pure
water. The most promising current technology to produce hydrogen is to
blast natural gas with nuclear-heated steam, stripping off the hydrogen
ions.
The search for a better way to
produce the gas has focused on a handful of microbes, thermotoga
neapolitana and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, the common green algae.
The unusual thing about the T.
neapolitana work is that it seems to produce its hydrogen from ammonia in
the form of cheap crystallised urea without fermentation at an optimum
temperature of 75 degrees C.
The system, which produces right
litres of gas an hour in a 14-litre glass bioreactor, should be easy to
scale up. The high temperature of the bioreactor kills other microbes,
which means sterile conditions aren't necessary--a big money saver. Also,
cooling the reactor stops hydrogen production quickly.
Researchers elsewhere are using
chlamydomonas reinhardtii, the common green algae, to produce hydrogen
instead of carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. Without sulphur, the
algae produce hydrogen by stripping the hydrogen atoms from water in a
process very similar to electrolysis, and producing very few waste gases
other than nitrogen.
But the algae are not as efficient
as they could be. The researchers are tinkering with the algae chemically,
physiologically, and genetically so that all of the light energy received
by the cell is used to mine hydrogen from the water.
This system presently produces
electricity costing 70 cents per kilowatt. Better efficiency can cut this
to seven cents, two more than for natural gas. Better reactor design and
recycling of the feedstock of inorganic chemicals could halve that cost
again.
A 20 million euro, five-year
multi-country European project uses fermentation and photosynthetic
bacteria. They will ferment agricultural waste in a large anaerobic
reactor, relying primarily on an extremophilic bacterium,
Caldicellulosiruptor saccharolyticus. That process releases some hydrogen
and also creates acetate. Then the brew is transferred to a glass-encased
reactor filled with the photosynthetic bacterium from the Rhodopseudomonas
species. That microbe breaks down acetate into hydrogen and carbon
dioxide. The waste stream can then be burned to produce more energy. If
all goes according to plan, they hope to harvest as much as 60 percent of
the hydrogen from the feedstock.
But Craig Venter, who decoded the
human genome, plans to build a hydrogen-producing engine, gene by gene,
from a skeleton extremophile bacterium.
Packaging
Dixie’s
To-Go range takes it away
Dixie Foodservice has launched a
new five-strong line of To-Go products for foodservice operators in the
$161 billion takeout market.
The range includes PerfecTouch
containers, Dixie Stoneware and Adaptables packaging, Liddles portion
cups, and Quilt-Rap bags that retain food temperature, stop leaks and
spills, and improve food presentation and image.
Manufacture
Tyson Foods to
close Maryland chicken plant
Some 650 people will lose their
jobs at the Tyson Foods poultry complex in Berlin, Maryland . Tyson aims
to close the plant by the end of the year at a cost of $30 to $35 million,
but saving $10 to $15 million from 2004.
The Berlin complex includes a
hatchery and feedmill, in addition to the million chickens per week plant.
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