Daniel Lubetzky

Pom Wonderful did something, err, wonderful for the food industry by fighting to uphold the standards of the category in which it leads, pomegranate juice, to the point of successfully suing unscrupulous new entrants who tried to ride on its coattails by marketing lower grade products as if they were the real thing:

"Consumers buy the products to gain the health benefit – if that is not present then there are problems for the category. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be more active in this area but we all know how under resourced they are. We are trying to protect the integrity of the category." Rob Six, spokesperson for Pom Wonderful

"Purely Juice", a company that claimed to sell purely pomegranate juice that was in fact primarily cane sugar and corn sweetener was ordered to pay $1.5mm to Pom.

The category for healthful snacks where KIND leads gets similarly hurt when consumers are duped into buying "natural" "nutritional" and "energy" bars whose ingredients contain refined sugars like high fructose corn syrup and refined flowers and hydrogenated oils, contributing to the diabetes and obesity epidemics overtaking America.  Similar enforcement action should follow for companies – big or small – that manipulate what it means to be "all natural" and "healthful."

[Read more →]

This episode of the Colbert Report is hilarious. Reporting on the news that fruit overtook cookies as the #1 snack for kids over 6, they note:

It’s an outrage that cookies are no longer the number one snack for children under six. Fruit is un-American.

Today we received some samples of interesting products from Turkey: fruits stuffed with nuts.  I thought they were great possible additions to our healthy snacks family – minimally processed, all natural, flavorful, just sun dried.  But it was funny (and sad) that in informal focus groups, most consumers were turned off by the look of the dried figs and encrusted walnuts.  Ok, dried figs and walnuts may well look like coarse mummy brains as some of my team members were saying.

  But it seems like some people are getting too used to over-processed artificially created surfaces that are smooth, brightly bleached and homogenous.  It is interesting that, while there is a huge backlash against these overly-processed products, some consumers have almost gotten hypnotized into expecting factory-bland looks, without recognizing the health implications.  It is almost as if we are being conditioned to expect the factory look, rather than the natural.

Epicurious, the blog that is an institution among foodies (published by Conde Nast, which also guides Gourmet and Bon Appetit Magazines), ranked KIND as one of the best products they tasted at the 54th Annual Fancy Food Show in NYC.  It was the only product in the snack bar category that got such mention.  Here is what they said about KIND PLUS, our new line:

Still made with natural ingredients you can actually see and pronounce, these tasty KIND nutrition bars are now enhanced with antioxidants, calcium, protein, and omega-3s. We couldn’t get enough of the tropical Mango Macadamia with calcium and the Cranberry & Almond with antioxidants.

The line may be blurry on this one.

Japan, Seeking Trim Waists, Measures Millions - an effort to prevent diabetes and obesity from the Japanese government by strictly imposing waistline limits on the population, with penalties for corporations and local governments that do not meet guideposts…

[Read more →]

It is not news that our bodies rely on bacteria to perform many functions, such as the bacteria in our digestive system that help deconstruct and process food. 

But what is fascinating according to a story in Genome Research reported by The New York Times, is the sheer volume of such relations, to the point that:

…bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome.

Since humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.

Robert Lee Hotz reports in the Wall Street Journal about how our brains are transformed by the alphabets and languages we learn. Those who learn English and those who learn Chinese use different areas of their brains – confirmed by alternate patterns of energy use and brain structure.   Hotz explains this could also be behind ‘cultural differences in memory, attention, and visual perception.’

Now add evolving changes in learning behavior with the advent of SMS, internet, cell phones, and all instant-input technologies.  Our brains are getting completely re-wired, and we don’t know what the implications of all that will be.

This is better than a warning on a cigarette box.

We have grown so distant from nature that we no longer know, or even care, about where things come from, or how they look in their original state.

I was curious about these, so I finally looked it up.  Can you guess their origins and natural form?

1) Water Chestnuts
2) Sesame Seeds
3) Oats
4) Cashmere: do you know what it is? Is it a process for treating cotton? Does it come from a plant? Does it come from sheep, or a goat, or a cow or other animal? Is it just the name for combing wool very softly?
5) Figs
6) Vanilla
7) Peanuts
Macadamias
9) Horseradish
10) A Head of Lettuce

First visualize whether you really know the above.  Then click below (in "More") for the answers.

[Honor System Reward - anyone in the US who guesses 5 or more right gets one free KIND bar - drop a note to dnixon[AT]peaceworks.net with your address and let Donna know Daniel offered this on his blog – offer valid for up to first 500 people who email her and who actually visited this site before May 31 2008; sorry for limitation but last time we offered a free KIND bar we got 16,000 emails]

[Read more →]

This guy, Randy Pausch, is truly inspiring.  Make sure you tune in till the end of his presentation.