American Food Industry Research Articles

Unleashing Competitive Advantage through Digital Marketing: Expanding Customer Access and Social Platform Development

Digital marketing represents a modern approach to marketing. This type of marketing is an important tool for gaining a competitive advantage. The primary benefits of digital marketing for the business sector include providing personalized attention to each customer and cultivating a sense of uniqueness and added value for the company. To effectively apply digital marketing in business practice, it is essential to develop a framework for evaluating digital marketing functions that consider the market’s regional socio-cultural characteristics. Based on this premise, the present study has identified the functions of digital marketing and its role in the development of competitive advantage. To achieve this goal, 71 active marketing experts in the American food industry were selected, and a standard questionnaire was distributed to them. The data was analyzed using the least squares linear regression model. The research results indicated that website development, expanding customer access, utilizing social platforms, and leveraging email for digital marketing all contribute to gaining a competitive advantage.

Anti-Black Racism in Food Advertising

Between 1947 and 1958, B.C. Sugar—western Canada’s largest sugar manufacturer—ran six major advertising campaigns that depicted Black people as laborers on sugarcane plantations. One of these campaigns, moreover, played upon offensive stereotypes of Black men as happy-go-lucky, childlike, and suited for manual labor. Analyzing the reach, content, and significances of these campaigns, this article suggests that despite increased civil and human rights advocacy in the 1940s and 1950s, at least one major Canadian corporation persisted in distributing anti-Black racist advertising. Such persistence reveals that white supremacist sentiment was entrenched in western Canada during this time. It also suggests that the western Canadian sugar industry particularly, and the North American food industry more generally, have been prone to anti-Black racism within advertising.

Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry by Anna Zeide

Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry by Anna Zeide

Anna Zeide, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry

Anna Zeide, <i>Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry</i>

Bob's Baloney

This case examines the financial performance of Bob's Baloney, a leader in the ultrapremium bologna market. While the business appears to be doing well with respect to most of its stakeholders, its largest equity investor has recently expressed strong dissatisfaction with the company's financial performance. Students are invited to examine the financial statements and ratios associated with the business to understand the source of the underperformance and to provide recommendations for business policy changes. Excerpt UVA-F-1942 Mar. 18, 2020 Bob's Baloney Upon entering the executive conference room in early 2021, Amanda Spangler had to pinch herself to be sure that she was really in an executive meeting at headquarters. After completing an MBA degree, Spangler had landed her dream job as a lead manager at one of the premier brands in the American food industry, Bob's Baloney (Bob's). Spangler's first months on the job had been all that she had hoped. She had wrestled with important business decisions, experienced the genius of some favorite foody legends, witnessed the drama of marketing a true premium brand, and even hobnobbed with several celebrities. It had been truly amazing. But her biggest surprise was what was going on right then in the conference room. It was clear that things were not well at Bob's. The Company . . .

Review: Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, by Anna Zeide

Review: Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, by Anna Zeide

Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry. By Anna Zeide. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 272 pp. Illustrations, map, chart, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $34.95, paper $29.95, e-book $29.95.

<i> Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry. </i> By Anna Zeide. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 272 pp. Illustrations, map, chart, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $34.95, paper $29.95, e-book $29.95.

Anna Zeide. Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry.

Anna Zeide. Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry.

Anna Zeide, 2018, Canned: The rise and fall of consumer confidence in the American food industry

Anna Zeide, 2018, Canned: The rise and fall of consumer confidence in the American food industry

Canned: The rise and fall of consumer confidence in the American Food industry, by Anna Zeide: A book review

The paper prepared in the form of a book review is a review of the book written by Anna Zeide, assistant professor of Professional Practice at Oklahoma State University, entitled: Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, published in 2018. The book is a part of the California Studies in Food and Culture Series of the publisher University of California Press, and is the winner of the James Beard Award for Reference, History & Scholarship for the year 2019, which is delivered by the James Beard Foundation, which has been promoting the food industry in the United States of America for already 30 years now, through scientific-research work, the development of the industry itself, the development of female leadership and leadership in general, as well as through other programs (James Beard Foundation, 2019).

Regionalism and Nationalism in Migrant Marketplaces: Transnational Social Geographies and the Globalization of Italian Food

Transatlantic Italian foods offer a paradigmatic commercial and cultural product of a migrant marketplace in which waves of mobile cooks and eaters from used food as a material and symbolic component of their identity as Italians in America, while also shaping notions of Italian food and the Italian nation. This paper advances the migrant marketplace framework by showing how notions of culinary regionalism and nationalism were constructed through the transatlantic circulation of culinary and cultural imaginaries. Combining commodity chain analysis and ethnic studies methodologies reveals a long-term synchronization of taste between Italy and America and across social and regional lines in Italy. By the mid-twentieth century, the American food industry had standardized diverse Italian regional cuisines into an image of red sauce and pizza, but in the 1970s, a new generation of mobile Italians and Italian Americans recovered those regional traditions and raised the global status of Italian food.

Selling food in clear packages: The development of cellophane and the expansion of self-service merchandising in the United States, 1920s–1950s

Abstract This article examines how the increasing use of transparent packaging, specifically cellophane, and a new self-service merchandising system altered consumers’ sensory experiences in food purchasing. It focuses on the American food industry roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s, a time when self-service became the dominant way of selling perishable items in the country. Clear packages provided consumers with a new way of understanding product quality. At supermarkets, where meat was already cut and bread packaged, and where consumers rarely had a chance to actually taste, smell or touch foods, they needed to rely mostly on visual information in selecting products. Businesses’ effort to capture consumer desire facilitated the creation of a new kind of visual regime, which rested on commercial intent, gendered narratives and technological manipulation, in the rise of consumer capitalism from the early twentieth century. By emphasizing the significance of colour in food consumption, retailers created food products and store interiors intended to stimulate female consumers’ chromatic sensation and their appetite for food purchasing.

Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Foods by Roger Horowitz

Reviewed by: Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Foods by Roger Horowitz Ted Merwin (bio) Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Foods. By Roger Horowitz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 320 pp. Starting as a niche segment of the American food industry, kosher food has become ubiquitous, with more than 70,000 products certified as kosher and close to 15 billion dollar business in annual sales. How kosher food became such a major segment of the marketplace is the subject of Roger Horowitz's engaging book Kosher USA. Horowitz explores how an ancient set of rituals governing food consumption among Jews was transformed by modern science through the fascinating story of how everyday foodstuffs like Coca-Cola (which contains glycerin), Jell-O (which contains gelatin), and Oreos (which originally contained lard) succeeded in becoming kosher, frequently over the vociferous objections of Orthodox rabbis for whom ingredients derived from non-kosher animals were patently unacceptable. Just as departments and interdisciplinary programs in Food Studies have sprouted up in colleges and universities throughout the country, the study of Jewish food has mushroomed. Hasia Diner's seminal Hungering for America (2008) spawned a spate of academic books on the history of particular Jewish foods, including Maria Balinska's The Bagel (2009), Laura Silver's Knish (2014), and my own Pastrami on Rye (2015). Gefilte fish, pickles, and rugelach await their chroniclers. At the same time, economic history has been its own gold mine for Jewish studies, with many exemplary works, such as Adam Mendelsohn's award-winning book on the rise of the clothing business, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (2014), and Rebecca Kobrin's edited volume Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (2012). Horowitz's timely book straddles these trends; it is situated at the junction of gastronomic and economic history. An independent scholar who directs the Hagley Library of Economic History, Horowitz's two prior books focused on the American meat packing industry, Negro and White: Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1990 (1997) and Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (2005). With Kosher USA, Horowitz again looks at meat, but this time in a kosher framework, and he also examines many other types of kosher food. The author frames each chapter with anecdotes from his own life and then weaves personal reminiscences throughout the narrative. For example, the book memorably opens with the relatives from the father's side of his family refusing to eat the sturgeon (which they deem to be [End Page 314] non-kosher because of its deeply entrenched scales) that is being served for a Yom Kippur break-fast by his maternal grandparents, triggering an epic battle that became part of family lore. The author's family members become characters in the story just as much as the rabbis, scientists, food manufacturers, and others for whom whether or not a specific food is ultimately authorized as kosher has significant ramifications for how they conduct their businesses or their lives. Horowitz demonstrates that these stakes were great, not just for companies that wanted to sell to kosher consumers, but for those consumers themselves, as the kosher food market began to go mainstream after World War II. He quotes numerous letters from Jewish supermarket shoppers to rabbis, asking if foods that they can feed to their own families are the same foods that their neighbors and friends are buying. The answer, unfortunately, was usually no; it often took decades for the rabbis' controversies over these foods to get settled. Horowitz also looks at non-Jewish customers for kosher products, specifically African-Americans, who, in the 1950s, before Hebrew National's "We Answer to a Higher Authority" and Levy's Rye Bread, "You Don't Have to Jewish to Love Levy's" advertising campaigns that aggressively targeted non-Jews, became the nation's biggest consumers of Manichewitz sweet kosher wine. It is when Horowitz traces the history of kosher meat that his narrative is the most compelling. The kosher slaughter industry was huge, especially in New...

The Rise of Synthetic Colors in the American Food Industry, 1870–1940

This article examines how, starting in the 1870s, food manufacturers in the United States began to use standardized color, achieved by synthetic dyes, as part of their marketing strategies. The emergence of the synthetic dye industry paralleled the growth of mass production and mass marketing in the American food industry. It provided food manufacturers with an economical means to standardize their products and helped establish brand identities through consistent appearance. By 1938, food dyes had achieved such widespread use, and had raised such public concern, that the federal government amended the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act to implement more stringent measures to regulate the industry.

An Argument for the Basic Legal Rights of Farmed Animals

The most abused beings in the United States are those whom we raise and kill for food. The numbers of dead are staggering. Most are victims of the severe and almost entirely unregulated practices that Americans permit on their factory farms. According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, in 2007, a total of 10.4 billion land-based animals were killed by the American food industry. These included 9.4 billion broiler chickens, 450 million laying hens, 317 million turkeys, 121 million pigs, 39 million bovines, 28 million ducks, 10 million rabbits, and 4 million sheep and goats—fifty times the number killed in biomedical research, for sport, as pests, and for all other reasons combined, carrying a value of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The degree to which animal enslavement is embedded in our society is difficult to calculate or fathom. In commenting on human slavery, slave historian David Brion Davis wrote in the New York Times that

Fast and Simple Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Method To Measure Conjugated Linoleic Acid in Beef

Conjugated linoleic acids (CLAs) are a group of linoleic acid isomers that are naturally found in food products originating from ruminants (meat and dairy). These acids have received special attention in recent years due to their potential human health benefits. Research efforts have been proposed to increase the CLA content in beef to improve public health. However, because there are more than 30 million beef cattle used each year by the American food industry, it will be necessary to ensure their content in a large number of samples. Therefore, it is important to have an inexpensive and rapid analytical method to measure CLA content in food products. Because gas chromatography (GC), a current popular method for measuring CLAs, is slow, this paper describes a nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy ((1)H NMR) method that is potentially >10 times faster than the GC method. Analyses show a correlation coefficient of 0.97, indicating the capacity of NMR to quantify the CLA content in beef samples. Furthermore, the method proposed herein is simple and does not require sophisticated sample preparation.

Fishing for Gold: The Story of Alabama's Catfish Industry

With a wonderful ear for dialogue and in flowing narrative style, Karni Perez weaves together oral histories collected from early hatchery owners, catfish farmers, processors, and researchers to recount the important contributions made by Alabamians to the channel catfish industry. Perez describes the struggles and glories of fish culture from its early days as an experimental venture to the thriving present-day commercial enterprise that supplies warmwater fish for the American food industry. As Perez states, catfish industry started out in Alabama as a do-it-yourself and figure-it-out-yourself kind of enterprise. We hear how men who were mostly cattle farmers learned to nudge male and female fish into spawning in crudely constructed aquaria, how growers discovered the dissolved oxygen needs of their herd when big die-offs occurred, how Lenson Montz and Otis Breland designed the first paddle aerator to remedy the problem, how farmers eventually trained a bottomfeeding species to rise to the water surface to eat so their numbers could be better estimated. In one dramatic story, we learn how an early processor experimenting with a skinning machine lost a piece of his hand in front of a crowd of horrifield locals but, after it was retrieved from the skin basket, it was reattached by a town doctor and healed perfectly. The machine was modified accordingly and became an essential component of modern fish processing. In addition to telling the remarkable stories of individual contributions by farmers and researchers, Perez explains the positive effects played by improved public infrastructure, continued biological research, state legislation, and federal recognition of aquaculture as agriculture. From Chapter Three: You're crazy, the bank officer declared with a friendly chuckle. Why, the Warrior River is full of catfish for anyone who wants them. There are more in there than people will ever eat. And you think you're going to go sell them when folks can go get them for nothing? That's just a bunch of dreams! From Chapter Two: A crop duster's error, a visit by a curious feed company researcher, a fluke of the weather, a coincidental encounter at a gas station...How could the three men, or anyone else for that matter, guess that these chance circumstances would play into the birth of an industry that would mushroom over the next forty or so years into one of the largest contributors to the state's economy and that of the entire southeastern United States?

Fast Food Nation

Combining in-depth historical and socio-political analyses of the American food industry with an easy-flowing language style, Fast Food Nation is nearly impossible to put down. Mind-boggling in scope, yet as intimate as one's own kitchen, this book allows the reader to grasp the true horror of the global food situation. Schlosser provokes both laughter and tears, ultimately inspiring the reader to engage in the "higher jihad" of controlling one's appetite with the understanding of how personal consumer choices have political consequences.&#x0D; Section One, "The American Way," takes us through four chapters. The first, entitled "The Founding Fathers," talks about how the mass production of the automobile transformed post-WWII American society and its land scape, and introduces us to the hard-working businessmen who gave fast food a permanent place in the car culture, replacing the lovely countryside with a nearly identical, ugly sprawl of fast food restaurants, subdivisions, and strip malls in every town. &#x0D; Chapter 2, "Your Trusted Friends," explains the appeal of the fast food industry to children and adults longing for their past childhood through the use of toys and mascots such as Ronald McDonald and Taco Bell's talk­ing dog. Gearing advertisements to the psychology of children has become a big business. Al I the major toy crazes such as Beanie Babies and Pokemon have been promoted by fast food chains. Cross-promotions extend to cartoons, movies, amusement parks, and now schools. Due to funding shortages, many schools have started promoting brand names of fast food and soda companies, whose ads now cover school hallways, buses, and even rooftops, while the products are sold to children during school hours ...

Health Care for Children of Migrant Families

Migrant and seasonal/farm workers constitute a major portion of the labor force in the American food industry. By harvesting and processing farm crops, they contribute positively to agricultural communities and the American economy. Currently, the office of Migrant Health estimates that nationwide there are between 3 and 5 million migrant and seasonal farm workers and dependents. The average annual income for migrant and seasonal farm workers is well below the poverty level (US Dept of Health and Human Services, unpublished data, 1988). Because health care insurance is invariably beyond the reach of migrant family budgets, and employers of farm workers rarely provide health care benefits for their employees, these families are usually uninsured. In some cases, these families lack US citizenship or are in this country illegally, which complicates obtaining health care for their children. Medicaid enrollment is also complicated by migration because aliens must meet eligibility requirements in each state to which they migrate, and only US citizens are eligible. Because of their income and mobile life-style, migrant worker families often find that comprehensive child health care (health maintenance, anticipatory guidance, and preventive medicine) essentially is not available. Migrating families must seek health care whenever it is available. This results in a pattern of service that usually is fragmented and ad hoc. Migration not only interrupts continuity of care but it also contributes to a lack of knowledge about a community's health services and/or jeopardizes eligibility for these services by conflicting with residency requirements. Other problems that delay or prevent access to health care for the children of migrant families include language barriers and differences in culture.

Transnational Corporations and Asymmetries in the Latin American Food System

Several years ago Bacha identified three intellectual streams in the burgeoning literature on unequal exchange. For Marxists such as Emmanuel, the problem was analysed as a central feature of the development of capitalism on a world scale which had its source in the existence of higher real wages in the developed Centre than in the underdeveloped Periphery. For neo-Ricardians such as Steedman, the phenomenon arises as a result of extending their critique of standard capital theory to the sphere of international trade. Lastly, there has been a long standing debate in development economics as to the distribution of gains from trade between developed and underdeveloped countries ever since the contributions of Lewis, Prebisch and Singer. This paper, which is concerned with the relationship between transnational corporations (TNCs) and markets in the Latin American food system, is situated within the institutionalist tradition of development economics. More specifically, my aims are twofold. Firstly, a transactional framework is outlined for identifying and explaining the presence of asymmetries in national and international food chains where TNCs may be present. Different types of asymmetry are distinguished in the context of a world economy increasingly integrated by means of both markets and hierarchies. Secondly, this general framework is used to analyse a specific transactional form which appears to be of increasing importance as a link between TNCs and agricultural producers in the region, namely production contracting. The analysis complements my earlier work on the determinants of foreign investment in the Latin American food industry, and on comparative advantage versus food security as agricultural development criteria for the region (Scott, 1981, and forthcoming).