"products" news and stories

Just over six months ago, Cadbury went through a major recall of some of their best selling products in the UK because the bars tested positive for traces of salmonella. In Canada, at about this time last year, the company had to recall some Cadbury Easter eggs because "pieces of hard plastic" were found in them. Now, the company is faced with yet another recall. This time, thousands of Easter eggs and chocolates were shipped out with no nut-allergy warning on the packaging, which puts those with such allergies at serious risk.

Since many of the chocolates have already been distributed, Cadbury is not only recalling them from stores, but chose to run ads in the newspapers to try to draw consumers' attention to the potential risk. A Cadbury spokesman could not give an estimate as to the exact number of products involved in the recall, but he speculated that the number of candies - primarily Easter-themed Cadbury Creme Eggs - would be in the thousands not the millions. The real danger for the company in this third recall comes from decreasing consumer confidence in their brand and whether the love of Creme Eggs (properly labeled ones) is enough to make consumers stay with them.

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Fruity Pebbles, Fruit Rollups and fruity candies are just a handful of the myriad products aimed at kids that promote their fruitiness. Not only are fruit flavors appealing, but the use of the word implies that that flavoring is natural, or at least that it has been derived from fruits. Of course, this is not necessarily the case and the Strategic Alliance for Healthy Food and Activity Environments proved it by doing a study entitled "Where's the Fruit?"

The study looked at 37 different products, all product aimed at children, where images of fruit and/or fruit ingredients were pictured on the packaging and found that half of them contained no fruit of any kind. Another 16% contained only "minimal amounts of fruit despite prominent fruit promotions on the packaging." For example, Yoplait's Strawberry Splash Go-Gurt Yogurt contained no actual fruit, nor did Berry Berry Kix.

Using a picture of fruit on a box isn't exactly false advertising, but it is misleading and the study certainly illustrates how important it is to read the ingredients and nutritional information on packaging when shopping for food if you really want to know what you're getting.

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A blade coffee grinder, which is the standard for most home coffee drinkers, has a food processor-like blade that swings around and chops up coffee beans. The grinders are usually fairly inexpensive and do the job of grinding up beans faster than you could do it with a hammer, but they are not necessarily very efficient, nor do they come close to getting the coffee beans evenly ground. Burr grinders, which are more expensive but crush the beans instead of chopping them up, produce even grounds and will generate the most consistent flavor in coffee - not to mention that they offer a range of sizes (from powdery fine to coarse) that work with different types of coffee makers, including espresso machines and french presses.

The Wall Street Journal's catalog critic sat down and tested a number of burr grinders to see which ones performed the best. The less-than-satisfactory grinders included the Capresso Infinity burr grinder, The Krups Burr Coffee Mill and the Cuisinart Automatic Burr grinder. The top performer was the KitchenAid Proline Grinder ($200), which produced grounds to exacting specifications and stored them in a nice glass container before use to eliminate the possibility of static charge making grounds adhere to the side of the container, as they sometimes did with plastic container models. The model given the "best value" designation was the Solis Maestro Burr Grinder ($115), which performed perfectly, but had a plastic grounds container that could have a minim static charge. In fact, it is the grinder that I use and it always does an excellent job - even with dark-roasted, oily beans that can jam up some other grinders. The KitchenAid would make a great Christmas gift "for coffee geeks," but the Solis is probably the way to go in terms of both price and performance.

The most popular cornbread mix on the market is Jiffy, and even though homemade is still the top choice of cornbread loves, it is a close second. It isn't the only cornbread mix on the market and in the last year, after very stagnant sales of muffin mixes - including cornbread - Betty Crocker decided that it was time to try and revamp their product to compete with Jiffy. The problem for them was that, even though they had a good product and Jiffy only advertised through word of mouth, they had a hard time driving up sales.

A General Mills executive decided to do a little in-house research with the help of some of the company's African American employees, based on the fact that African Americans account for more than one third of all cornbread sales in the US. What he found was that they didn't buy Betty Crocker either. One employee even said "I'd never eat Betty Crocker cornbread because it's not for black people."

With the feedback from the employees and not much else, the company tweaked the packaging to feature skillet cornbread, rather than corn muffins, and approached B. Smith for endorsement and to be a spokesperson for their healthy-eating "Serving Up Soul" campaign. The endorsement of a respected, award-winning chef and restaurateur gave the rebranded cornbread a little more credibility, and sales got a boost - rising almost 25% in the last year.

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After months and months of green and white tea based products, including Enviga, green tea lattes and even green tea vodka, some beverage companies are starting to go back to black teas as the inspiration for their drinks. Nestle and Coca Cola announced this week that they would be concentrating their joint venture project on black tea-based beverages after the group has rolled out Enviga in Europe in early 2007.

The green tea craze was all in the name of the various health benefits that have been attributed to it. Black tea is still a consumer favorite, however, and now there are studies that have shown that drinking any kind of tea can be good for your health, so there is no reason to stay away from it as a drink option. On top of that, green tea seems to have oversaturated the market for the time being and people are probably ready for a change. It will be interesting to see what the group comes up with, since green tea drinks tended to be far more innovative than the average flavored ice tea and perhaps some of the inspiration for those drinks will be applied to black teas now.

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