The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

A few weeks ago, Twin Citizen waking up to their coffee and toast were surprised to hear that one of our beloved local bakeries, the French Meadow, had been raided by federal agents. Was the French Meadow aiding and abetting terrorists with its awesome vegan lunch menu? Or was its name a tip-off to general anti-American sentiment and brioche? No, the feds seized thirty thousand loaves of bread. The problem, they said, was that it was mislabeled as “wheat-free” spelt bread. Spelt, they argued, is itself a species of wheat. Thus, according to the linguistics professionals at the Food and Drug Administration, spelt bread cannot be marketed as an alternative to wheat bread. It all turned out to be a bit of a misunderstanding, but it publicized an important and timely issue: As food and food marketing become more complex, how do we know for sure that we’re eating what they tell us we’re eating?

 

And it’s not just new-age foods for new-age allergies. In a manner of speaking, food labeling predates the Holy Bible. Last May, a few sharp-eyed customers in Super Target stores were no doubt surprised to see the little “OU” symbol on packages of pork tamales manufactured by St. Paul’s El Burrito Mercado food company. The OU symbol—it’s called the heksher in Yiddish—is affixed only to foods that are certified kosher by an organization of orthodox rabbis and professional food scientists. You don’t need to be a rabbi to know that a heksher on a pork tamale is farblondget (seriously screwed up).

Increasing numbers of people want to know precisely how their food is grown and processed. More than ever before, they see a trip to the grocery store as an opportunity to examine their diet and their values, and to practice a kind of consumer activism. They want food that jibes with their ethics, lifestyle, and dietary preferences; they may be worried about potential side effects of genetically modified organisms; they may wish to eat foods produced only in accordance with the current foodie zeitgeist. Perhaps they adhere to religious dietary requirements, or have any number of food allergies. And food producers today are answering the demand with a movement, a marketing angle, and a range of technologies. It is called “Identity-Preserved Processing.”

The modern food-supply chain is an amazing and efficient thing. A fresh hamburger at a local pub, for example, was probably still on the hoof less than seventy-two hours before landing on a bun on a plate in front of your lunch date. As accelerated as that history might be, it is nevertheless a history: Was the animal a two-year-old Angus steer, or was it a ten-year-old Holstein, retired after a long career as a high-butterfat milker? Under what conditions was it dispatched? How was it treated and what did it eat while it was alive? Did it receive antibiotics or hormones, and if so, what kind and how frequently? (Indeed, the provenance of beef is an especially developed science, thanks to the numerous bio-hazards such as E. coli and BSE that have evolved as a result of modern agri-business practices.)

There’s a history in your coffee mug as well. Although the sign on the air-pot behind the counter reads “Fair Trade Organic Ethiopian Sidamo,” how do you really know that it came from Ethiopia, much less that the coffee grower was paid a fair price for his effort? Or did the same guy who labeled the kosher pork tamale certify the coffee beans too?

According to Dr. George John, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, a sizeable international trend is under way. That idea is to take traditional food commodities—non-specialized, mass-produced items like wheat, corn, hamburger, milk—and de-commoditize them, not by adding features or changing the taste, but by identifying and preserving information about the way in which they were made and processed. Since verification of this information naturally becomes key, particularly to the end user, identity-preserved processing portends a revolution in food marketing. (Coincidentally, this is happening at the same moment that non-commodities like accounting and journalism are being commoditized and outsourced to call centers in India.)

The process of kosher designation is an illustrative example, but the real glamour and profit margins of IPP are more easily observed at work in the world of fine wine. The alpha example of IPP, says John, is the value that quality vintners extract from their wine labels. “With wines,” he said, “especially European wines, there have always been geographic appellations. Unless a wine is grown in the right area, you can’t call it a Burgundy.

“Now that companies have the ability to preserve identity in other areas of agriculture, they sense that IPP is going to be the big marketing opportunity going forward, because agriculture wants to become less commodity oriented.” John explained that if you take a regular worldwide commodity like coffee or cocoa and you start emphasizing its provenance, you begin not only to distinguish it from all the other commodities in its category, but also to insulate it from general market fluctuations. “The commodity prices have crashed, so instead producers try to differentiate themselves. How do they do that? By micro-branding commodity products on the basis of geography, micro-climate, ancestry of the seed, and other non-observable traits.”

To do this, producers need some way to track and trace products throughout the maze of farmers, processors, transporters, and retailers that make up the food-supply chain. It’s that sort of micro-branding—not just red wine, not just Burgundy, but the detail provided down to the vineyard, the grape variety, and the year the grapes were harvested—that makes fine wines so different and so much more profitable than other goods.

“Based on new technologies coming on line within the food-production industry,” said John, “it is now possible to provide consumers conceivably everything they could ever want to know about the way the food on their plate was grown, processed, and cooked.”

This information is valuable for the simple reason that consumers are willing to pay an additional premium for it. “Food companies are now spending millions of dollars to develop a capacity to produce identity-preserved products,” he said. “Say you go and buy flour from a grocery store. Using advanced software and technologies such as radio-frequency identification, food companies could tell you the fertilizer used on the fields, what kind of genetically modified seed was used, the location of the field in which the grain was grown, and so forth. That’s identity preservation, and that’s going to be important because producers can get huge premiums for foods produced in certain, verifiable ways.”

If the current wave of designer commodities and boutique foods reaches the tipping point and becomes commercially mainstream, an enormous reorganization of grocers’ shelves will take place. (And it seems to be doing just that, judging from the growing organics sections at Cub and Rainbow, for example. They are already trying to capture some of the business from cutting-edge retailers like the Twin Cities’ upscale grocers and co-ops.) It won’t just be Pillsbury flour anymore. The technology exists to allow bag-by-bag and bottle-by-bottle micro-branding. In the near future, it is likely that you will be able to buy—and, more to the point, choose to buy—unbleached flour, made from non-GMO wheat grown in Pembina County, North Dakota, and fertilized using only manure from alfalfa-fed dairy cattle.

That may seem like a stretch, but it’s already come to pass in parts of the gourmet food and produce market. Heritage Foods U.S.A., a Michigan-based producer of poultry and pork, sells meat that comes from old-style, heirloom breeds. Each “Red Wattle” or “Gloucestershire Old Spots” pig it sells comes with a label that provides online access to data about the pig’s life history, from birth to slaughter. The company’s website even provides a link to a web-cam so customers can keep an eye on their bespoke Thanksgiving turkey as it enjoys its summer, scratching around the barnyard.

A recent market research survey published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs showed that consumer willingness to pay for IPP-labeled products was measurable and significant. In this study, fifty percent of consumers were willing to pay a premium of ten percent on the average for fair-trade foods like coffee. A smaller but still significant number—ten percent—were prepared to pay a premium of up to twenty-seven percent. For a commodity like coffee, that’s a massive profit margin.

While the profit potential of de-commoditized foods is an enticement to food producers, there’s also increasing concern about maintaining safety. Recent advances in biopharmaceutical agriculture, or “pharming” as it’s often termed, will make IPP crucial to ensure that food crops stay clear of pharmed products in a separate supply chain. Six years ago, for example, a large quantity of corn chips were found to contain bio-engineered corn that had been intended not for human consumption, but for livestock feed. A 2005 study by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology at the University of Richmond says the most compelling reason to establish identity-preservation and traceability systems stems from food safety, not marketing considerations. “In the future, incentives for IPP and traceability will increase as genetically modified crops are used to ‘grow’ pharmaceuticals or industrial chemicals that should stay out of the food supply,” said the Pew study’s authors.

The key to protecting food provenance, just like provenance in, say, antiquities or rare documents, lies in the chain of custody. At its core, IPP is about stringent and copious record-keeping and reliable product-handling systems, but it also is made possible by a number of new technologies. Bar-coding, for example, has not only accelerated distribution processes, it has also made them much more precise. Radio-frequency identification tagging is also a recent development that makes it possible for commodities to ship with what amounts to an encyclopedic packing slip. Together with specialized supply-chain software, document management, and certification systems, these technologies record and store the crucial facts about the food’s origins and identity.

Again, kosher foods provide the basic model; kosher meat is one of the oldest examples of food-related identity preservation. For beef, lamb, or poultry to be certified kosher, the butchering process must be overseen by an independent inspector in the slaughterhouse. Casual observers might believe that it is merely a matter of having a rabbi stand by and ritually wave his hands over the process, but the tradition includes security measures all along the distribution line. In order to ensure that the food is actually kosher, a concrete system of inspection, verification, and tracking is used. According to Rabbi Seth Mandel, chief of the meat inspection division at the Orthodox Union of New York, less than half of the animals inspected are declared kosher. If everything is done in accordance with Levitical rules, the inspector affixes unique, numbered tags, which he keeps stored under lock and key, to the animal’s carcass, liver, sweetbreads, and so forth. The kosher tags stay with the meat all the way to the deli case.

There are several hundred organizations worldwide that certify kosher goods. Some of the most well known include the Orthodox Union, the Organized Kashrus Laboratories, and Kosher Supervision of America. Smaller agencies often operate locally or regionally in the supply chain. Each agency has its own distinctive heksher which indicates a product’s ingredients and preparation process are kosher.

Probably less than two percent of coffee produced globally qualifies as Fair Trade, says Scott Patterson of Peace Coffee in Minneapolis. Fair Trade is a distinction that proves to socially aware consumers that the coffee was produced in a manner that provides growers and pickers a fair wage for their labor. To qualify, the coffee must originate in local cooperatives and be inspected and verified by a representative of the body that sets the standards for Fair Trade. Beans so designated often go direct from growing co-op to roaster, and always with an information trail that can be audited.

Some labels are more valuable than others. Consumers Union keeps tabs on the value and veracity of more than one hundred and thirty labels and certifications, ranging from the very specific and valuable “USDA Organic” and “Rainforest Alliance” tags to the “Cruelty-Free” and “Environmentally Preferable” appellations that are not independently verified and so signify little. (The mother of all of these empty certifications is, of course, “All-Natural.”) There are IPP product labels that denote the organic production of foods, the social sustainability of the way in which it was produced, the welfare of the animal from which it came, and even—in the case of biodynamics—quasi-religious rituals of production. The point is not so much what producers want to claim about their foods; it is about establishing a method for third-party verification to back up whatever those producers choose to claim. IPP, then, is a way to enforce truth in advertising, to protect both consumers and producers from false claims or meaningless standards.

Then the argument becomes what the standards are. When the U.S.D.A. announced the establishment of the official organic label several years ago, many small growers and retailers disagreed with the standards. They felt the requirements were lax and allowed corporate agri-business operations to make misleading claims about their food—for example, by allowing the use of synthetic fertilizers that were somehow still organic in designation, or by allowing growers of hormone-free chickens to feed their birds non-organic feeds. Those with more stringent ideas about what makes something organic are now discussing some sort of “beyond organics” designation.

“Most of us found that a little funny,” said Rabbi Mandel, when I asked him about the kosher pork tamales. “But the person in charge of enforcement did not find it funny at all. It happens. There was a jar of octopus with an OU label on it, too.” So how does something like that happen?

“In a lot of these cases, the guy who owns the food-processing company has no idea what the OU symbol means, doesn’t know what kosher is,” said Mandel. “He figures it must be a good thing, so he goes and puts it on, and sees what happens. He figures he isn’t going to get caught. But we have an army of consumers who look for kosher certification, and if they see something like this, they call us.” The certifying body normally has an enforcement department that will then approach the producer and notify him that their heksher is being used illegally.

Today, the supply chains for our food are global. Since you can’t personally verify the source of your daily diet, the value you put on IPP foods comes down to how much the overseers of the supply chain can be trusted to maintain the integrity of their claims. Once in a while, a cozening business owner will risk his or her reputation, as in the case last year in which cheap zander perch was sold as walleye on the menus of a number of Twin Cities restaurants. While not as dangerous, perhaps, as passing off a candy bar as nut-free to the deathly allergic, any self-respecting Minnesotan should have been mad as hell.