The Italians must be pissed.

The European Court Justice ruled that Germany can keep calling that hard, salty, crumbly cheese often grated on top of pasta and pizza "parmesan." Italy and the European Commission had filed suit against Germany for labeling their non-Italian-made cheese as Parmesan even though it had not been made in the Italian region of Parma.

Wait, I'm pretty sure that the grated "Parmesan" they sell in those green-topped plastic bottles at the grocery store for $2.99 isn't from Parma either.

Trader Joe's is a newcomer to my neck of the woods, opening in Chapel Hill just a few months ago. I'm a huge fan – whenever I can deal with the crowds I head over there to pick up my growing list of favorites. So far my favorites include their almond butter, Greek yogurt, sweet and spicy walnuts, paper bag pecks of "eco apples," Triple Ginger snaps, dried mango with chili and red pepper hummus.

But I have also had some real losers. The frozen hamburgers I had a few weeks ago were as hard as hockey pucks, with a weird, almost gamy smell. An apricot flan tart tasted of sticky cardboard, like an office meeting Danish left to dry for a week on the boardroom table. I was thinking of picking up some dessert for tonight, but I don't want to risk another disaster.

There have been plenty of Trader Joe's "favorites" lists in the past, but seeing how their stock changes so ridiculously fast, I'd love to start another one. So tell me, please, what's your favorite thing at TJ's? What to avoid?

People dedicated to eating an organic lifestyle don't mind paying that dollar or two, or even ten, extra for organic foods.

But with the demand for organic foods increasing at near 20% year over year, not only are prices going to go even higher. Organics might be hard to get your hands on at all.

You'd think that with increased demand, you just have to increase supply. The increase in demand is one side of the problem. The other side is a very low and slow supply that is nowhere near keeping up with the demand, not only domestically, but in China as well.

Lots of companies are trying to manage this by simply switching their food products away from organic. It doesn't mean that their products are bad, it just means that they aren't certified.

We've all had that dream. We're sitting on hour 14 of our work day, slumped down in our non-ergonomic chair, staring at the spreadsheets on our screen, ignoring the phone that's been ringing off the hook for the last 12 minutes, dreaming about leaving it all behind to...open a bakery.

The idea of waking up every morning and heading to the kitchen instead of a cubicle deep within the confines of a concrete and glass office building is warm and inviting, is it not? Sure, if you happen to not care about actually making money from your bakery. According to Forbes, the bakery business is in the Top 10 LEAST profitable businesses to start. In fact, the average pre-tax profit of a bakery is negative - you lose money.

So our advice to you when you stress out at work and want to march right out of your office to bake bread? Do it, but bake a loaf at home, then go back to work the next day.

Get your passports updated, Slashfoodies.

Dunkin Donuts is opening its first store in Shanghai, China this Spring, with plans to open 100 stores over the next 10 years.

Yeah, so an American retail chain is expanding overseas. So, why would you need a passport?

Because the Dunkin Donuts in China, along with the regular menu items like, oh, coffee and doughnuts, will serve special fare that is tailored to the local Chinese tastes, which we won't get here. That means Chinese customers can get things like honeydew melon doughnuts and mochi rings.

And they probably won't have Rachael Ray as their spokesmodelperson.

Beer is one of my favorite beverages. However, I have never really gotten into beer cocktails. Apparently that isn't true for all drinkers of beer, especially in the Latino community. They've been mixing beer and Clamato for generations, or so I have recently found out. Well, word must have gotten out to the beverage companies because Anheuser-Busch and Cadbury Schwepps have recently announced the introduction of Budweiser & Clamato Chelada and Bud Light & Clamato Chelada.

Test introductions in initial markets were tremendously successful. So, as of Monday, January 14, 2008, the Chelada cocktail was rolled out nationwide. The drink is to be sold as a 24 ounce single serve can or as 16 ounce -4 pack cans.

This team up from the major beverage makers is aimed at making it easier to get a perfect beer/clamato cocktail. They may also be hoping to bridge cultures, as this combination is mostly a favorite in the Latino community. Chelada is actually a shortening of a phrase that means "my cold beer". If Chelada becomes popular in most demographics, it could be a real unifier for our divided nation. Maybe someone could mention that to our presidential candidates. You never know.

[Via BeerAdvocate.com]

I am a beer lover. Apparently, so are many more people out there. Anheuser-Busch has recently announced an increase in shipments to wholesalers of 2.1 million barrels, or 2% over last year. The total number was 104.4 million barrels. That's a lot of beer.

Company president August Busch IV attributes the increases to a couple of things. Primary is that the company has expanded its beer portfolio, including the addition of InBev European Brands. The increase is also due to better marketing and sales strategies, according to company spokesman.

I guess importing more beer and giving serious beer drinkers more choice was a good move for the company. I know I appreciate a better selection in my local liquor store. Cheers!

[Via BeerAdvocate]

"Oh my god! They want how much for that piece of chocolate?!?!"

I'm not sure how many of us have actually stood indignantly in a grocery store aisle screaming the above statement since a Hershey bar is usually under a dollar, but if you have, you might be justified.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the US Justice Department is looking into possible price fixing in the chocolate industry. The Justice Department's anti-trust division has contacted Mars (makers of M&Ms and, duh, Mars Bars), Nestle, and Cadbury. Representatives from both Mars and Nestle said they will cooperate with the investigation, though a Cadbury spokeswoman had no comment.

Damn! And I love those Cadbury Creme Eggs at Easter, too!

Commercial beekeeping is a huge industry, though the component parts are very small. Bees are directly responsible for $15 billion worth of agriculture every year because they are needed to pollinate fields of all types of crops, as well as to produce honey. Farmers could rely on wild bees, but there just aren't enough of them to be reliable. The problem is, that there really aren't enough beekeepers, either.

There are roughly 125,000 beekeepers in the US and only 600 are commercial keepers. Almost three-quarters of all the beekeepers in the US are over 45 and most of them are retired, having embarked into beekeeping as a hobby. This means, in effect, that $15 billion worth of industry and agriculture "depend[s] on a bunch of retired hobbyists."

The issues that surround beekeeping, from fighting the mites that destroy the bees to shipping them out to farmers season after season so that crops can be pollinated, are actually more complicated and more interesting than you might expect. It's a hard industry that is getting harder to sustain every year - and yet so much depends on it. Reading the whole Plight of the Humble Beekeeper at eGullet will give you a new perspective on what is - and isn't - a buzzing industry.

[thanks, Elise]

Advertising companies and politicians like to play with semantics for the purpose of changing images. Big soda companies seem to be heavily invested in changing their images this year - with Pepsi completely revamping their packaging and Coke teaming up witt Jay-Z to promote Coke Zero - so it isn't entirely shocking to hear that they no longer want soda to be thought of as "carbonated soft drinks." Instead, they're "sparkling beverages."

In what some might describe as a blending of advertising and politics, the name change represents some social climbing on the part of soda companies. They are trying to distance themselves from their high-calorie, junk food roots, which politicians and other people in positions of power continually hold against them. Unfortunately for the cola companies, soda is so popular that no matter what Coke and Pepsi executives decide to call it, changing the name for the product to "sparkling beverage" is like trying to change the word for "beer": it's just not going to happen.

Earlier this month, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote a company memo that expressed concern over what he termed the "Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience." StarbucksGossip.com first posted the memo online and its authenticity was later confirmed by Starbucks, then picked up by more traditional media outlets.

The memo basically said that because of the rapid and wide-reaching expansion of the company, as well as the desire to do so quickly and efficiently, there has been a "watering down of the Starbucks experience." For example, switching to automatic espresso machines removed "much of the romance and theater that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines (the manual machines the stores used to have)." Another issue Schultz had was with the store designs, which have become too standard, too sterile and, in some cases, too distanced from actual coffee.

Speed and quality are important to any food service business, but not at the expense of experience of the customers' enjoyment and Shultz is proposing that they start making some changes to recapture that coffee shop experience that Starbucks first offered. There won't be a full-scale reversal in company strategy in pursuit of this goal. Instead, changes will be implemented gradually to move the stores away from the cookie-cutter, fast food chain genre while still chasing a larger global presence. Examples of this include having baristas measure out freshly roasted coffee beans, rather than having them in prepackaged bags, and changing the merchandise to have more coffee-centric merchandise, like grinders and brewers, instead of stuffed animals.

The changes planned for now seem small, but getting the aroma of freshly roasted beans back into the stores is a step in the right direction.

We love smoothies. New consumer research shows that smoothies have been one of the fastest growing food/drink markets over the past five years, where sales have been up more than 80% to over $2 billion in annual sales. This includes both made-to-order smoothies, from businesses like Jamba Juice, as well as pre-packaged products.

There are a couple of reasons for the popularity of smoothies, but the biggest one is that they are perceived as being health-conscious, without being too "healthy." Most smoothies involve a blend of milk, yogurt, sorbet and fruits, often with additional vitamins and supplements mixed in. They aren't necessarily low calorie, but they are better for you than a double cheeseburger and fries in terms of nutritional content. Smoothies are also convenient, and their appeal as an "on-the-go meal" is one thing that has helped them become a fixture in people's busy lives. The biggest market is people 18-34, with 50% of respondents to researchers inquiries said that they had at least one smoothie a month.

To keep up the growth, smoothie manufacturers will have to look to new flavors and new twists on their existing recipes. Look for more flavors/ingredients in existing recipes, like the addition of green tea and açaí, and expect to see a wider range of offerings, from low-calorie smoothies to decadent ones, to draw in new consumers.

Skyr isn't carried in too many American stores, but the Icelandic yogurt definitely has its fans. It is thicker than conventional yogurt, largely because it is strained, much like Greek yogurt. You are most likely to be familiar with the yogurt if it is carried at your local Whole Foods, where it is packaged into small containers and flavored like conventional yogurts, with berries, vanilla, etc. Despite the generally positive reaction from consumers, Whole Foods no longer promotes the fact that they carry Skyr, or any other Icelandic products, because of the company's offical policy of dissapproval for Iceland resuming commercial whaling last year.

The average consumer, perhaps the average Skyr fan, in the US isn't aware of the whaling issue and because Whole Foods hasn't promoted it, they're not likely to - especially because Whole Foods is planning to stock more Icelandic products this spring. Whole Foods will be carrying Nói Síríus chocolate easter eggs in approximately 70 stores. To entice WF to stock the eggs, Nói Síríus seems to have offered them at almost no cost, as the marketing director of the chocolate company said "There are no profits involved, this is first and foremost a sales experiment." More will be imported next year if they prove popular. Whether Whole Foods will be promoting them now, or in future, is still unknown, though it certainly seems like it would be a good business strategy to promote the products you carry if you're going to carry them at all.

Whole Foods had been expanding breath-takingly fast over the past several years, with new locations - many of which are huge or feature unusual amenities - popping up all over the place. Being everywhere is one way to beat out the competition (think Starbucks), but another way is to buy them up. Whole Foods has just announced that they will be buying Wild Oats Markets, one of their top competitors, for $565 million, with the deal expected to to close over the next few weeks.

Colorado-based Wild Oats has 110 stores in 24 states and British Columbia and has not been doing as well as its rival. Whole Foods has twice the sales per square foot of retail space, though Wild Oats has smaller stores, and recently lost both their chief executive and chief financial officers.

Some stores will be closed and others will be relocated to fit in with existing Whole Foods stores, but Whole Foods feels that they can improve the Wild Oats stores on the whole and "put jet propulsion under [them]" to bring their sales up to Whole Foods levels. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey estimates that it could take two ears to fully integrate the Wild Oats stores

Starbucks, contrary to popular belief, does not pays less for their coffee than other coffee buyers, using their size to bully their suppliers into meeting extremely low prices (like one here-unnamed major retailer does). In the past year, Starbucks paid about 36% more than the average price per pound of coffee beans, shelling out $1.42 for every pound of beans they bought.

Does this definitively prove that Starbucks is making the world a better place for all coffee growers and that there will be no starving farmers working coffee plantations in the world? Of course not. The latter problem can't be helped because that low average price means that there are companies paying far, far less for their products. What this does mean is that Starbucks is making positive policies that will benefit growers in the long run, setting a higher standard that other buyers will, hopefully, meet at some point.