Ban looms for kid ads 
New index for North America
Carbo-loading the chip business

Marketing

Ban looms for kid ads

The UK Department of Health is likely to ignore food and beverage industry fears and to ban some types of food promotions aimed at children. No details were given, but could include give-aways with breakfast foods and offers that encourage overconsumption, such as two-for-one.

The recommended ban covers non-broadcast promotions. It stems from an inconclusive meeting of the DH’s Food and Advertising Forum, which includes industry and consumer bodies. Meanwhile, the regulator of the advertising industry, Ofcom, is due to report in autumn on the regulation of broadcast advertising.

A discussion document tabled at the meeting set out 16 “Tier 1” principles and 10 “Tier 2” principles to govern promotions aimed at children. Another 13 govern the promotion of foods high in salt, fat and sugar.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drink Association, the UK’s industry spokesman, says its members have improved the nutrition value of food and beverages steadily over the past year. In the main, they have cut the salt, fat and sugar content of a range of products. This is the result of a “multi-billion pound innovation and reformulation programme on household name products, which will deliver both more choice and improved nutrition,” the FDF said.

However, US-based Kraft Foods, took the lead in child-targeted promotions earlier this month. It promised to push only its healthiest products to kids aged 6-11. In January it said it would shift most of it $800m ad budget, 90% of it TV-based, to support brands that meeting its Sensible Solutions nutrition standards.

Sustainability

New index for North America

Investors keen on making their money make money and do good have two new indexes by which to judge their aims, the Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index and a sub-index of US-only firms.

At the launch speakers noted that conscience-led investing has shifted from purely moral goals to those that seek long term ethical goals as well as economic returns.

The indexes comprise the top companies in terms of economic, environmental and social criteria from the two regions and provide solid benchmarks for sustainability-driven North American and US equity portfolios. In total, over 4 billion US Dollars are presently managed in DJSI-based investment vehicles.

Accounting for issues such as corporate governance, climate change, supply chain standards, human capital development and labour practices, the analysis ranks companies in terms of sustainability in every industry. For the DJSI North America, the top 20% in each sector out of the biggest 600 North American companies are chosen. At the launch the index covered 111 firms, 93 from the US and 18 from Canada. – are included in the new index.

Earlier this month the DJSI World index added 57 companies added and deleted 54, while the pan-European sustainability benchmark – the Dow Jones STOXX Sustainability Index – added 25 and removed 29.

“Sustainability is continuing its move from corporate strategy and operations into product and service offerings,” the index maker says. “ Corporate focus and the differentiation between leaders and laggards is shifting towards sector-specific issues such as healthy nutrition in the food industry, business opportunities for consumer goods in emerging markets, as well as anti-crime prevention in the financial sector.

“Transparency and accountability along the whole supply chain are increasingly visible through policies and control mechanisms. Key aspects in that context include the definition of environmental and social supplier standards as well as auditing procedures.

“Industry groups such as the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI) are adding further impetus to this development. Sustainability indicators are increasingly linked to financial value drivers and integrated into annual reports. New regulations, such as the UK Operating & Financial Review (OFR) standard, are important drivers behind this.

Research

Carbo-loading the chip business

Researchers at Iowa State University have developed a new surface patterning method to make carbohydrate chips for bioscreening. The method is based on a fluorous Teflon-pan like surface interacting with fluorous-tagged compounds. 

Although the application of microarray chip technology to the study of carbohydrates is relatively new, it holds great promise for disease detection and vaccine development in animals and humans.

"The success of DNA and protein microarrays in chip format for biosample screening using small sample volumes has led to a variety of technologies that diagnose many diseases," says Nicola Pohl, who developed the new method. "Extending this concept to other biomolecules has been challenging."

Fluorous-tailed sugars stick to the Teflon-type surface, which allows the tagged carbohydrates to be fixed in a microarray format on standard glass microscope slides.

"The surprising part was that this fluorous interaction was strong enough to allow standard bioassays on the chips without rinsing away the sugars," Pohl says.

The method should rival the speed and ease of solid-phase synthesis currently used for the commercial production of DNA and peptides, Pohl adds. "It will allow a whole range of carbohydrate chips to be produced, including chips that contain sugars of particular interest to plant scientists," said Pohl, a researcher associated with Iowa State's Plant Sciences Institute.

The method should also work with other molecules, such as peptides, on the same chip. This will let researchers screen for antibodies correlated with diseases such as bacterial or fungal infections, and diseases with known biomarkers (molecular indicators) such as cancer. And the new chips can help screen new biocatalysts that act on carbohydrates and discover new proteins, such as plant lectins, that bind to specific carbohydrate sequences.

"The same principle can be used to screen for antibodies that bind to certain sugar structures on pathogens. We will know if that person or animal has come into contact with the pathogen and which carbohydrates the person or animal generates an immune response against. We can then develop carbohydrate-based human and animal vaccines," Pohl says.