Over the course of this investigation, we’ve uncovered a number of details about how the private-label food business works, not least of which is information about who makes what for which stores. We’re working on uncovering more information about Wal-Mart and CostCo, so please drop us a line at investigations@thefastertimes.com if you happen to know anything about how either of those stores sources food, or want to help us find out more.

In the meantime, we’ve put together a decent guide to Trader Joe’s products, pasted below. If any of you would like a pdf to print out at home, just email us and we’ll send you one. And of course, please feel free to leave a comment here or email us with any additions to the guide.

One bit of news: This morning reader Amy Carson wrote to give us a heads-up on a bit of Trader Joe’s trivia that’s very important for those on a raw food diet. Apparently, whether products in Trader Joe’s stores are labeled raw or not, they are pasteurized, which makes them off-limits for those on a raw food diet. This includes all of the stores’ nuts and its “raw” almond butter as well. In Trader Joe’s defense, this is probably part of an effort to protect itself from any liability incurred by people eating unpasteurized items, getting sick and then suing the store, but nonetheless the labeling should match the product. Amy pointed us to this site for more information.

(Please support this investigation and independent journalism by becoming a member of The Faster Times — and choose your gift.)

And now, the guide:

The post Trader Joe’s Shopping Guide – The TFT Reader Investigation Continues… appeared first on The Faster Times.

As our food systems have grown increasingly complex over the past 50-odd years, it has become more and more difficult for consumers to know where their food comes from and how it made its way from a farm to their table. Even if you’re buying directly from the farmer, there comes a point in time where the consumer simply has to trust that what the producer is telling them is true. The same goes for retailers, which have to assume that, for example, the dairy selling them certified organic milk is actually certified. Not every store can have its own team of food auditors out there ensuring that everything is as it appears to be. That job is supposed to belong to the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but both of those departments are understaffed and over-influenced by industrial agriculture.

That leaves the job of evaluating food claims essentially to consumers and consumer watchdog groups. Unfortunately, in many cases, consumers have to be food experts to decipher food labels, much less to find the information not printed on labels. In the case of milk and meat, however, there are tracking numbers that will give consumers at least a bit more information. The numbers have to be there in case of food recalls, but they also help give consumers a clearer picture of where their food comes from.

In a comment on our Trader Joe’s story, one reader shared the website Where Is My Milk From?, a great resource for tracking milk cartons back to their source. Just go to the site and type in the code stamped on your carton (see image below) – sometimes it is printed or stamped on the label, sometimes it’s stamped on the carton and sometimes it’s indented into the carton, but it’s always two numbers followed by either a dash or a space and then two to five other numbers. The first two number correspond to the state, and the following numbers correspond to the plant.

I punched in the numbers from a Whole Foods 365 organic milk carton and got California as the state (that makes sense, I live in California), but the plant number (187) was listed as invalid. Frankly, it was almost impossible to see the plant imprint on the carton (it was indented into the cardboard carton at the top, near the mouth), but I tried every permutation of that number and still came up with nothing. The Trader Joe’s-brand organic milk was much easier to trace. The number 06-691 was printed in clear black ink on the label. When I punched it in I got a map showing me the location: Clover Stornetta Farms in Petaluma, California. It’s a great dairy whose branded products I buy with confidence all the time–so that’s peace of mind on my milk purchase and a new item for our expanding list of Trader Joe’s items (I’ll post an updated version this week for those of you who want a copy).

Unfortunately, while many dairies process their own products, ranches do not typically process their own meat. Instead, carcasses are shipped to a processing plant where meat is cut (or ground) and packaged. To trace your meat packages, look for the little white USDA circle: It will say “U.S.” in bold and then “Inspected and passed by the Department of Agriculture,” followed by a bold “EST” and a number (see image below). That number corresponds to the packing house the meat came from. If you search on Google or Scribd, you’ll find the plant name, but you’ll need to contact the plant to find out where the meat actually came from and you’re not guaranteed answers.

As part of the TFT Reader Investigation, we have been trying to find out if any dairies are illegally selling converted organic cattle as organic beef (a dairy cow can be converted to organic over the course of three years, but to be certified organic beef, a cow has to be managed organically from its third trimester on). So far, we’ve managed to track Trader Joe’s private-label ground organic beef to a packing house in Southern California called Culver City Meats.

When I called and emailed to find out where the meat was coming from, I got the following answer, via email: “All of our cattle is raised in the USA 100% Angus mostly from the Midwest.”

I followed up to ask where their organic beef came from in particular and got no response. I’ve been following up, but if a few readers could join the effort, that might convince them to share more information. Following is information for the account executive I’ve been dealing with:

Melissa Permut Account Executive (323)973-4049 (direct line) (818) 917-9922 (cell)

melissap@gwtinc.com

While I’m waiting for Melissa to get back to me, I tracked a few other packages of Trader Joe’s 100% Grass Fed Organic Ground Beef back to Culver City Meat Company as well, so they seem to be the primary supplier for California stores at least. I also tracked Whole Foods grass fed organic ground beef to Panorama, which lists the following information on its site: “Panorama Organic Grass-Fed Beef™ cattle are raised by family ranchers in Northern California, Southern Washington, Southern Oregon and Wyoming on USDA Certified Organic pastures of natural grasses, legumes and range forage. Panorama’s beef is sold at Whole Foods Market stores throughout Northern California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Utah, and to independent retail grocers. We also sell direct to the consumer through Abundant Harvest Organics, an alliance of small family farmers in central California.”

The North American Organic Ground Beef I found at Costco I traced to Dakota Farms Natural Beef, one of the few ranching operations in the country that births, raises and processes its cattle all within its own facilities. But while the company uses no antibiotics or hormones, manages its land responsibly and plans to participate in the forthcoming Certified Humane labeling program, it has no information on its site about whether its cows are in confinement throughout their lives or not, or what the cattle are fed.

Next up: Wal-Mart. In the meantime, a free package of ground beef to the first five readers willing to either trace a package or help me pester Culver City Meat Company for information. Just post a comment here or send an email to investigations@thefastertimes.com.

Please support this and future investigations by becoming a member of The Faster Times today. You can join for as little $12 and you’ll receive at least $25 worth of gifts— plus the good feeling that comes with supporting a team of independent journalists who are trying to create a new model for the newspaper. (Sign up right away to make sure you’re on the list for our first members-only event.)

About TFT Reader Investigations: First we asked you to vote on the topic you wanted to investigate together with our reporter. It was a new experiment in journalism, which caught the attention of the Columbia Journalism Review. Now the voting is over and we have a winner: generic and private label foods. To track our progress, please check out the earlier installments of the investigation series.

We need your help. Tips can be sent to investigations@thefastertimes.com – And please sign up on The Faster Times e-mail list (see sign-up box to the right) to make sure that you receive updates on the investigation as it progresses.

The post Tracing Your Food: Farm to Table Is Not as Easy as It Sounds. The TFT Reader Investigation Continues… appeared first on The Faster Times.

Every once in awhile when I’m researching a story, I come across a lie told so openly no one suspects it to be anything but the truth. This one is a whopper. A company called Brandt Beef, which markets itself as “The True Natural,”and is the primary supplier to Dean & Deluca, supplying what the gourmet retailer describes as “high-quality sustainable beef,” operates what is pretty clearly a standard feedlot. Its corn-fed steers are male dairy calves, raised almost entirely in confinement … not exactly what springs to mind when you think of “natural, sustainable beef.”

If you’re a regular reader of this series, you know by now that a few weeks ago a reader referred us to an ace source in the meat industry, who we refer to as Beef Throat. When we spoke with him, Beef Throat referred us on to Nicolette Hahn Niman, wife of rancher Bill Niman and author of the book Righteous Porkchop. Although she’s a vegetarian herself, Niman is an outspoken advocate of sustainable meat production. We talked to her last week about private-label foods, and our ongoing investigation into whether or not some private-label organic dairies are illegally selling converted dairy cows as organic beef. But Niman also suggested we look into Brandt, a company she said chefs were always asking her about and which seemed to be operating in a pretty unnatural way for a company that marketed its beef as natural and sustainable.

We took her suggestion and contacted Brandt to get some more details about how their steers are raised. Managing partner Eric Brandt was happy to oblige and confirmed everything Niman had said. It’s a clear case of consumers just needing to look past marketing and labels a bit. Or of the FDA needing to enforce labeling laws that protect consumers, not companies.

First off, it’s important to point out that the label “natural” doesn’t really mean anything. On its website, the USDA defines the use of the term: “A product containing no artificial ingredient or added color and that is only minimally processed (a process which does not fundamentally alter the raw product) may be labeled natural. The label must explain the use of the term natural (such as – no added colorings or artificial ingredients; minimally processed.)”

Last year the agency revised its rules on using “natural” or “naturally raised” on meat products, stating, ““Livestock used for producing meat and meat products have been raised entirely without growth promotants or antibiotics (except for ionophores used as coccidiostats for parasite control) and were never fed animal byproducts.”

Unfortunately, recommendations that Niman and many other sustainable ranchers made, encouraging the USDA to include such things as humane management and grazing to the term, fell on deaf ears.

Brandt, to its credit does not use antibiotics or hormones in the raising of its steers. “We do allow antibiotics when they’re babies; in their first three months they can get a therapeutic antibiotic if they get sick,” Brandt says. “We feel like it’s too early to not use antibiotics if they get sick. But for the next 18 months or whatever their lifespan is there’s no antibiotics.”

The company also only has steers and it knows where every one of them comes from. Brandt sells every part of its steers, and uses their waste as compost to grow the alfalfa the steers sometimes eat. It’s a family-run, independent business.

The thing is, up to that point, their story is pretty good. They can make some claims to sustainability, they’ve got the family-run business thing going, and they don’t use hormones or antibiotics. On the other hand, their steers are all male dairy calves that are taken from their mothers after a day or so and placed in a nursery where they’re fed artificial milk until they go to the Brandt feedlot and start eating corn. Were they not making a big point of marketing how sustainable and natural their meat is, that might not be such an issue, but that appears to be the company’s primary marketing strategy and it seems patently misleading to consumers.

A few facts, right out in the open on Brandt’s own site:

That last sentence is where the problems begin. For most people, raising a cow humanely does not correlate to keeping them in crowded confinement pens and never allowing them to graze. When I asked Brandt if his steers ever graze, his answer was simple and straightforward: “No, they’re on a feedlot.”

The odd thing is that Brandt has gotten so many people to buy its “natural” image without really making any effort to hide its practices.

The reason I’m especially annoyed about Brandt beef is that I’ve had chefs–more than three or four–who are committed to sustainable sourcing ask me what I think about Brandt,” Niman explains. “They were told either by distributors or by Brandt salespeople that this was this great natural beef that they should try, and they wanted to know if I had heard of it and what I thought. I was sitting on the Chef’s Collaborative national board for the past three years, and the organization’s mission is to encourage sustainable sourcing, so I was doing a lot of direct work with chefs, and I wanted to get them answers. The first thing I did was look at the website carefully and they acknowledge there that their stock is all male dairy cows grown in feedlots.

Brandt, however, is unapologetic about both the feedlot and the corn feeding.

For hundreds of thousands of years the market has been driven toward quality and corn-feeding and the marbling of the beef and now some people overdo it, yes, and they’ve used antibiotics to speed things up and are feeding to excessive levels, which isn’t healthy for the animal, and because of that it’s created a stigma, and in certain respects it’s not correct,” Brandt explains. “The industry has gone too far, but you can do it correctly – you can give them a balanced feed and not have to give them antibiotics their whole life. I just got back from Japan and they’ve perfected the art of corn feeding.

It’s about quality, and quality comes from grain-feeding,” Brandt continues. “I disagree with the argument that cattle are not meant to eat corn; if you put cows in a field of corn they’ll mow it down, because there’s nutrition there. It’s all a vegetarian diet. If you go to the Bible and read about the slaughter of a fatted calf–the fat one didn’t eat grass, I’ll tell you that right now.”

The corn question, while interesting, is somewhat irrelevant in this case. The bigger problem is: Can you call something “natural” and “humanely raised” if it’s raised in confinement on a feedlot?

The post How Natural Is that Dean & Deluca Beef? The TFT Reader Investigation Continues… appeared first on The Faster Times.

About TFT Reader Investigations: First we asked you to vote on the topic you wanted to investigate together with our reporter. It was a new experiment in journalism, which caught the attention of the Columbia Journalism Review. Now the voting is over and we have a winner: generic and private label foods. To track our progress, pleas check out the earlier installments of the investigation series.

We need your help. Tips can be sent to investigations@thefastertimes.com – And please sign up on The Faster Times e-mail list (see sign-up box to the right) to make sure that you receive updates on the investigation as it progresses.

Thanks to some truly amazing reader researchers, and a stroke of good luck, I got the chance last week to speak at length with Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop and wife of sustainable rancher Bill Niman, about both private-label foods and our ongoing look at the organic ground beef conundrum.

First, a little background on Niman: She is a lawyer by trade, and she was the Senior Attorney for the environmental organization Waterkeeper Alliance, under Robert Kennedy, Jr., where she was in charge of the organization’s campaign to reform the concentrated livestock and poultry industry. Before that, she was an attorney for National Wildlife Federation. She’s also an author, and a blogger for HuffPo and The Atlantic. She has been a vegetarian for 20-odd years, but is nonetheless a tireless advocate for sustainable ranching. Through her decades of research, including the several years she has spent on a sustainable ranch in California, she says she has come to realize that animals are an integral part of sustainable farming, and that the idea that you can eat in such a way that no animals will be harmed in the production of your food is a myth.

Her views have made her controversial at times, but Niman tends not to voice an opinion unless it’s backed up by scientific research and buoyed by her own decades of work in the field. Plus, most people find it difficult to argue with a nearly lifelong vegetarian who is as committed as Niman is to promoting sustainable meat production. When I mentioned the whole dairy cows being sold as organic beef thing to her, she said she and her husband had just been discussing that very thing.

“The first thing people need to realize is that, for the most part, all dairy cows eventually become ground beef,” she says. “That’s something that vegetarians often don’t realize and don’t particularly like to think about. I myself didn’t realize it for a long time.”

At one point in the not so distant past, about half of the beef in the United States came from dairy cows, according to Niman. Then the dairy industry set about making dairy cows bigger–a lot bigger. Now, Niman says the amount a dairy cow produces has increased almost sevenfold in the last few decades. “What that means is we actually have fewer dairy cows and a lower proportion of dairy cows vs. beef cattle, but they’ve [dairy cows] always played a major role in beef production,” she explains.

But while Niman has known for some time that most dairy cows wind up as ground beef, she says she was unaware until recently that dairy cows in today’s organic milk industry are going into organic meat sales. “That’s something I just found out within the last year,” she says. “I’m not troubled by that if those are pasture-based dairies–I’ve been on quite a few and read about and seen photos of totally grass-fed dairies and those are excellent environments; the cows have a high quality of life and grass is a very natural diet for cattle.”

“I think to label the beef from those cows as organic is an okay thing to do because it meets consumer expectations for animal welfare and I also think it meets largely their expectations as far as food safety and health advantages when they’re buying organic,” Niman continues. “But, there have been a large number of organic dairy cows in the US that are living in confinement–for example, at the Aurora and Horizon dairies–where the operators had to let them outside in order to meet the National Organic Program’s pasture requirement, and they were just letting them out on dirt lots. The grazing time was zero or close to zero. So selling that beef to consumers as organic? I think that is misleading to customers and should not be permitted.”

Even with the pasture-raised example, I think most consumers would be surprised, so I think you could definitely say that that information should be available to consumers, but I don’t think it’s AS concerning as the idea of the confined dairy cows being sold as organic ground beef.

With regards to private-label foods in general, Niman says the problem is really information and quality assurance. “The Niman Ranch model is such that there’s a set group of farms they get meat from and they don’t get it from anywhere else and all of those farms have to follow certain standards,” she explains. “That’s a great approach stores could take. They could say something like ‘We only source from within 100 miles and here are the standards we demand.’ Consumers still have to rely on the store to enforce those standards, but I think it’s a strong system and I do think they’re kind of moving in that direction. I mean Whole Foods has put a lot of effort into drafting their humane standards, and I know Trader Joe’s is following standards for their sourcing as well.”

According to Niman, Trader Joe’s is probably more able than most stores to move in the direction of having standards and transparency because it’s part of their business model to have relatively few products on their shelves. “They do almost everything in private label. They had Niman Ranch do stuff and didn’t private label it because the brand has so much value, but there was a lot of discussion about that – they really wanted it to be private label, as much as they liked having the brand,” she says.

But while other TFT sources have said the store, like Wal-Mart and other retailers, often applies pressure on suppliers to lower their prices, Niman says her husband’s experience was not that at all. “What Bill found was that they were not constantly applying price pressure on them; they have ways that they reduce their costs in order to deliver lower prices, so it’s not about trying to nickel and dime their suppliers, in our experience.”

As for super private-label producers–companies that only do private-label items for stores, and about which it’s difficult for consumers to find any information at all–Niman says consumers should put the pressure on stores to tell them more. “I think it really boils down to the idea that consumers really need to do some homework and see what they can trust,” she says. “If it’s a store that people have faith in–and consumers should really think about that and ask themselves: Is this a store that demonstrates to consumers that it’s doing its homework? That it’s trying to be transparent, has animal and land stewardship standards in place, that sort of thing? If you can see a store is doing that, then I don’t think it’s necessarily problematic that a farm doesn’t have its own brand. But with a private label product, consumers should be asking, literally at the meat case or dairy counter, ‘How do you know this is organic?’”

Teaser: Niman also let us in on yet another beef scandal. We’re digging into it a bit more and plan to bring you the scoop this week.

Please support this and future investigations by becoming a member of The Faster Times today. You can join for as little $12 and you’ll receive at least $25 worth of gifts— plus the good feeling that comes with supporting a team of independent journalists who are trying to create a new model for the newspaper. (Sign up right away to make sure you’re on the list for our first members-only event.)

The post Nicolette Hahn Niman on Private Label Food and Organic Beef – The TFT Reader Investigation Continues… appeared first on The Faster Times.

About TFT Reader Investigations: First we asked you to vote on the topic you wanted to investigate together with our reporter. It was a new experiment in journalism, which caught the attention of the Columbia Journalism Review. Now the voting is over and we have a winner: generic and private label foods. To track our progress, pleas check out the earlier installments of the investigation series.

We need your help. Tips can be sent to investigations@thefastertimes.com – And please sign up on The Faster Times e-mail list (see sign-up box to the right) to make sure that you receive updates on the investigation as it progresses.

This weekend I tested out a suggestion from a reader-recommended source, about how to trace where private label meat comes from. On every package of meat, the USDA places a code that can be traced back to the source of the product. Unfortunately, in the case of private-label products, the code only gives you the location of the packing house, not the origin of the meat. Nonetheless, it’s a good first step in trying to figure out a question we raised in an earlier investigation post: Are organic dairies illegally pawning off old dairy cows as certified organic ground beef?

Our source is extremely knowledgeable about the meat industry, but since he’s still very much professionally involved, he prefers to remain anonymous. Which gives me no choice but to give him the best off-the-record, anonymous source name in the history of reporting: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Beef Throat.

“We know that every dairy is always going to sell their meat,” Beef Throat tells us. “And we know they just went through a large culling process in the organic milk business due to a dip in organic milk prices.”

But did those culled organic dairy cows — some of which could never qualify for organic meat status because they were not born organic — end up in your “organic” dinner?

Mark Kastel, of the watchdog group The Cornucopia Institute, has told us that if we can figure out which organic milk dairies are selling organic ground beef, he’ll be able to tell us whether they’re doing so illegally.

So, our next goal is to find out which organic dairies are selling organic meat. And Beef Throat has some good advice: “Every package of meat in the country needs to have a USDA bug on it, and from that you can trace precisely where any meat is coming from – you can gather who the manufacturer/processer is,” Beef Throat explains. “But then it’s the next part that’s tricky – where they’re sourcing it. There are traders in the middle and there’s so much inscrutiny there.”

“I think if you call up the packing houses, though, they might be inclined to tell you, especially if they know that if they don’t you’re going to write ‘I traced this beef to this packing house, but they wouldn’t tell me where they got it from,’” Beef Throat says.

As a first step, we’re buying and tracking packs of ground organic beef and tracing the USDA bug on the package – it’s a little decal at the bottom of any meat product, and we’re hoping you can help as well.

Once you’ve got the number, just go to Google or Scribd and type in USDA# and then the number. I tried it on a package of Trader Joe’s brand organic grass-fed beef and found it came from Culver City Meat Company, which is affiliated with Golden West Trading Company. My next step is to call them up to see if I can get them to tell me where their organic beef comes from.

So there you have it. I’ll be making a call to Culver City Meat Company this week and will report back on what I can find. In the meantime, I’ll also be tracing other packages of meat, and I hope you’ll give it a shot as well and share your findings.

(As a side note, it’s not just organic dairies that are selling off their older cows as ground beef. According to Beef Throat, the majority of ground beef on the market comes from dairies – “definitely at McDonalds and those sorts of places,” he says.)

Please support this and future investigations by becoming a member of The Faster Times today. You can join for as little $12 and you’ll receive at least $25 worth of gifts— plus the good feeling that comes with supporting a team of independent journalists who are trying to create a new model for the newspaper. (Sign up right away to make sure you’re on the list for our first members-only event.)

The post Introducing Beef Throat – The TFT Reader Investigation Continues… appeared first on The Faster Times.

About TFT Reader Investigations: First we asked you to vote on the topic you wanted to investigate together with our reporter. It was a new experiment in journalism, which caught the attention of the Columbia Journalism Review. Now the voting is over and we have a winner: generic and private label foods. To track our progress, pleas check out the earlier installments of the investigation series.

We need your help. Tips can be sent to investigations@thefastertimes.com – And please sign up on The Faster Times e-mail list (see sign-up box to the right) to make sure that you receive updates on the investigation as it progresses.

Nobody wants to hear anything bad about Trader Joe’s, and in a lot of ways it’s a great store. But it’s also a business that operates in the shadows. About 80 percent of Trader Joe’s food is private label, a trick it picked up when it was purchased by German superstore Aldi in the late 1970s.

Aldi is Germany’s equivalent of Wal-Mart, and has helped to deliver some of the lowest grocery prices in the world to Germany, mostly by mastering the private-label system. The company was started by two brothers Theo and Karl Albrecht. In 1979, Aldi bought Trader Joe’s, but the brothers had a big falling out and now Theo owns Aldi Nord, which controls all the stores in Germany, and Karl owns Aldi Sud, which controls Aldi stores in North America. Trader Joe’s is owned by Aldi North and although TJ’s remains relatively autonomous within this arrangement, it’s clear that the store began getting into the private-label grocery game in a big way once Aldi got involved.

By keeping its inventory low and its percentage of private-label foods high, Trader Joe’s is one of the most profitable grocery retailers in the country. And it’s not just about price: The store has done an amazing job of branding itself as your friendly neighborhood store, despite the fact that it’s owned by a giant multinational company. When pressured by Greenpeace recently to stop stocking fish on its red list, the store responded repeatedly that it listens to its customers.

The problem was that Trader Joe’s wasn’t giving its customers the information they needed to make informed decisions. In fact, in one store, one of those famous hand-written signs, reading “All the Fish in This Cooler Is Sustainable” hung right above a smaller sign that read “Orange Roughy, $8/pound.” Orange roughy is a red-listed fish. It is also on Australia’s list of endangered species, and is considered by the Marine Conservation Society to be “vulnerable to exploitation.” The orange roughy got into trouble when commercial fishermen started bottom trawling, picking up large batches of the fish. Since orange roughy live up to 150 years, once their stocks were depleted, that was basically that. Now several environmental groups are pushing for a ban on orange roughy fishing to give the species a chance to replenish.

But Trader Joe’s stayed true to its mantra. When Greenpeace launched a campaign to inform consumers, and those consumers started complaining to the store, it got rid of orange roughy and announced in March a plan to phase all unsustainable fish out of its stores by 2012.

On the private-label front, in most cases, the store starts out working with a branded product, then works out a private-label deal with the producer. One reader mentioned to us that they hint at these conversions in weekly staff memos, so we asked him to get us some examples and he did. The bulletins are long, so I’m not going to post both of them here, but any reader interested in seeing them can email investigations@thefastertimes.com, and I’ll send them to you.

In the meantime, here’s a great example from the April 29th bulletin of an announcement of a branded product (Poland Springs water) going private label:

The bulletin also reveals the other side of private label: how it works from the producer side of things. In this chart, for example, notice how the Niman Ranch baby-back pork ribs are being discontinued to make room for new TJ babyback ribs:

In some cases, that means the brand producer is going private label, but in this case, another source told us, the order with Niman–a large one that constituted the majority of the ranch’s rib supply–was unceremoniously canceled.

Niman is a fairly large enterprise, so while a shift like that could throw it for a loop, it’s probably going to bounce back alright. Small producers are not so lucky.

“You’d hear stories about it all the time, this small producer who was basically putting all their eggs in the Trader Joe’s basket and then they wouldn’t be able to shave another penny or two off their price and the order would be pulled and the company would be ruined,” says Jeff Porter, a former buyer for Andronico’s Markets [a local chain of gourmet food stores in Northern California] and current Wine Director for Mario Battali’s Osteria Mozza in L.A.

“But it’s hard for companies to sell to Trader Joe’s and anybody else,” Porter continues. “First, Trader Joe’s doesn’t like them to, and second, other stores didn’t like them to either. They know they can’t compete with Trader Joe’s prices.”

Quality food at a cheaper price is okay by me. As I’ve written in previous investigation posts, though, what doesn’t sit quite right is the lack of transparency — the fact that it’s next to impossible for consumers to figure out where their food is coming from. Moreover, Trader Joe’s has cultivated a following of consumers who would seem to care about things like putting small businesses out of business, or compensating producers fairly or being owned by a giant discount retailer.

Then again, people need to eat, and no one has extra money to burn. Our way around the issue is to try to figure out where all the TJ’s products come from. So far we’re off to a decent start (see list below), but we need your help to get more information. Know something or know someone who might know something? Please comment here or email us at: investigations@thefastertimes.com.

The post Trader Joe’s Revealed! The TFT Reader Investigation Continues… appeared first on The Faster Times.

About TFT Reader Investigations: First we asked you to vote on the topic you wanted to investigate together with our reporter. It was a new experiment in journalism, which caught the attention of the Columbia Journalism Review. Now the voting is over and we have a winner: generic and private label foods. To track our progress, pleas check out the earlier installments of the investigation series. And please sign up on The Faster Times e-mail list (see sign-up box to the right) to make sure that you receive updates on the investigation as it progresses.

Last week we started looking into where private-label organic beef comes from after a reader turned us on to a source in the beef industry. The source told us that some large private-label organic dairies might be selling meat from older dairy cows as organic beef. We’re continuing to follow that story, and this week spoke with Mark Kastel at the Cornucopia Institute, an organic food watchdog group.

Cornucopia was the organization that first drew press and regulatory attention to the practices of Aurora Organic Dairy, one of the largest suppliers of private-label organic dairy milk, which it found to be in violation of organic standards. The organization has been focused on the organic milk industry for the last few years, but Kastel says they are now gearing up to dig into the organic beef and poultry markets, where he says there is “a lot of abuse, especially in private-label.”

Kastel alerted us to a few changes that are currently being proposed to the National Organic Program and would affect all organic beef, private-label or otherwise. “Right now, a lot of the ranches, especially the big ones, send their cows to a traditional feedlot to be ‘finished,’ which basically means cramming corn down the cows’ throats for the last 150 days, only in this case it’s organic corn,” Kastel says. “Our position is that that’s not organic. If the National Organic Program decides to continue to allow it, we think there should be different labels so that consumers can know how that meat was produced.”

We’ll keep you posted on any changes on that front. In the meantime, Kastel helped clarify for us why selling meat from old dairy cows might be illegal, in addition to being somewhat gross and misleading for consumers who believe they’re paying a premium for higher-quality meat when they’re buying organic.

“To be an organic beef cow, the cow has to be managed organically from the time it’s in its last trimester, before it has even been born,” Kastel explained. “For organic beef, that’s it, period. On a beef ranch that has converted to organic, if it has some conventional cows, they need to be separated out from the herd and tagged so that they’re never slaughtered as organic.”

Organic dairies have far more lax standards. “With a dairy ranch, it’s different—you’ve got one chance to convert,” Kastel says. “Let’s say I milk 50 cows and my ranch isn’t organic, but I’m a good farmer and I manage my ranch fairly sustainably. If I want to convert to organic, it takes three years of not using any chemicals on my ranch, and then in the last year I need to use no drugs and only chemical-free food on my cows. Then a wand is waved and my farm is now organic.”

However, Kastel pointed out, those converted cows cannot legally be slaughtered as organic beef. “Ten years down the road, when those cows have calves and then those calves have calves of their own, THAT meat can be sold as organic if that baby was always managed as organic, even in the womb,” he explained.

Even in the legal instances, however, dairy cow meat would never be sold as anything but ground beef, according to Kastel. “These are typically older cows, they’re not the young fresh cows that you’re going to sell steaks off of.”

Kastel doesn’t know which organic dairies might be selling organic beef, but he said if we can tell him the names of the dairies, then he can tell us whether they’re doing it legally or not. “I know where most of them get their cows, so it will be pretty easy to tell which ones are doing it legally,” he said. “Most of the giant organic dairies—the Dean Foods [producers of Horizon Organic Milk] and the Aurora Organics, for example—most of them brought in one-year-old conventional cows, and at two years old, they were considered organic dairy cows. None of those could be sold as organic beef.”

We’ve got a couple of leads on figuring out which dairies might be doing this, but we need your help. Next time you’re in a Wal-Mart, Trader Joe’s, Safeway, Costco, or Whole Foods, ask them who supplies their store-brand organic ground beef. If you can get an answer, let us know and we can track it to the source.

And we’re still continuing to research other aspects of the private-lable food business as well. Don’t forget to check out the earlier installments of the investigation series, as well as some of our background resources (listed below), and please comment here or email investigations@thefastertimes.com if you’ve got information to share or a lead you think we should follow.

To help get you started, following are links to a few handy resources:

Trader Joe’s contact page: This company’s main slogan is that it gives its customers what they want; if you’re a customer, ask to know more about where TJ’s private-label foods come from.

Cornucopia Institute: This is an organic foods watchdog group that has called out many of the private-label dairies for poor practices. Tons of their reports and findings are available online.

Wal-Mart – There’s a wealth of information out there about Wal-Mart’s love of store-brand items, including a 2006 BrandWeek study conducted during the year when private-label really started to take off in the U.S.; a greatFortune article written last year when the store relaunched its “Great Value” brand; and an Advertising Age article in which Wal-Mart’s CMO defends the store’s shift to more private-label brands.

Private Label Magazine – The private-label industry is big enough to have its own magazine, which profiles a variety of retailers and their store brands.

The post Just How Organic is Your Organic Beef? The TFT Reader Investigation Continues… appeared first on The Faster Times.

Note: Tips can be sent to investigations@thefastertimes.com

Please sign up on The Faster Times e-mail list(see sign-up box to the right) to make sure that you receive updates on the investigation as it progresses.

So far we’ve had a couple of major breakthroughs as part of the TFT Reader Investigation–first, we’ve discovered the brand-name manufacturers of dozens of private-label products (we’ll continue to update our chart, leaving readers with a handy guide once the investigation ends), and second we’ve uncovered what could be a pretty shady connection between organic dairies and organic beef.

We’ll be bringing you more info on the latter later this week, but first, we need your help in another area, what we’re calling the super-private label foods–the stuff made by folks who only do private label products. So far we’ve uncovered two: Aurora Organic Dairy, which supplies store-brand organic milk for Target, Wal-Mart and Safeway, and the Inter-American Products Company, which we know makes Kroger’s private-label foods (and is owned by Kroger), but we hear also supplies a number of other stores.

Here’s what we need your help with:

1. Who are these manufacturers’ customers? We want to get a better picture of how many stores these companies are supplying.

2. What are the other super-private label manufacturers out there? Where are they? We want to find out as much as possible about these operations.

The linked websites above are a good place to start, as are the labels on some store-brand foods. Not all labels include the manufacturers’ information, but a good many do. Another good place to look? In the parking lots of grocery stores and big box stores, where shipping boxes might be getting thrown out.

I’ll be looking in all of these places as well, but the more people we can get involved, the better information we’re likely to get. And remember, the goal is not to bring down the store brands, but to educate ourselves so that we know which products are a good value and which are just poor quality–or worse, unsafe.

The post Help us Find the Super-Private Brands – The TFT Reader Investigation Continues appeared first on The Faster Times.

Update: This is the third installment of the TFT Reader Investigation of generic and private label foods. Read part one here and part two here.

If you’ve got any more leads, information, or sources to share, please continue to send them our way by either commenting here or emailing to investigations@thefastertimes.com.

____________________________________

First, the good news: We’re finding plenty of information which suggests that the private label food system sometimes works quite well, providing consumers with quality brands at cheaper prices. For example, Trader Joe’s European-Style Organic Yogurt is made by Straus Family Creamery which also makes Straus Organic Yogurt. The only difference is that the Trader Joe’s version is about 80 cents cheaper.

Of course, it takes some digging to figure out who makes what, and it would certainly be nice if Trader Joe’s shoppers had more information about the companies making their store-brand products, but, at the very least, in many cases the companies making the private label version have their own equivalent brands on the shelves and are visible enough in general to be held accountable by consumers.

Where the system can break down, we’re finding, is when a private-label product is made by a company that only makes private-label goods. In this scenario, where the producer is always a step removed from the consumer, there’s almost no accountability.

And lack of accountability isn’t the only problem with private label foods that don’t have name brand equivalents. There is also the problem of industry knowledge and supply chains. While brand name manufacturers either produce their own product or have a network of trusted suppliers, buyers for stores like Trader Joe’s or Costco, responsible for sourcing private label goods in a variety of food categories, aren’t likely to be as knowledgeable of a given sector and are also constantly looking to shore up large supplies of product. That means they can inadvertently end up working with less reputable suppliers, which helps explain why private label organic products at Safeway, Wal-Mart, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have all been found to be in violation of organic certification in the last five years

This dilemma was explained to us by a source who has at various times bought and sold sustainable and organic meats. And he tipped us off to a potentially big problem with organic private-label beef that we’ll continue to investigate.

It all began with organic milk: There has been a glut of organic milk on the market since 2007. That glut was caused by two things: first, farmers wanted to convert before the standards for organic dairy certification got stricter (and more expensive), and second, in 2005 demand for organic milk outpaced supply so companies were going around offering incentives to farmers to convert to organic so they could buy their milk. It was a regular milk rush.

Then, all of a sudden, vast quantities of organic milk flooded the market and the price for the milk went down; so far down that some organic dairy farmers were having to sell their milk at conventional prices just to get something for it. “There’s still a glut, and so some organic dairies, especially the private label guys, are culling their herds–that basically means they’re killing off cattle so that they’re not producing as much, because they have too much supply,” our source tells us. “It’s a normal thing that happens in the dairy world. But, what’s happening with a lot of these cows is that, because they’ve been living on certified organic dairy farms, these guys are selling the beef as organic beef. So I see these families rolling around with ground organic beef in their carts and I think most of it is probably from some old, decrepit ‘organic’ dairy cows.”

The brand label buyers have established supply chains – they’re not likely to take meat from a supplier that they don’t know. But, according to our source, the buyers from big private label outfits might be tempted. If the supplier they buy organic milk from all of a sudden has organic beef on offer, they might not second-guess it, especially if it’s well priced. And even if they know the beef is coming from the dairy cows, they might not see anything wrong with that. After all, it’s a cow that was raised according to organic standards. But standards for dairy cows vs. cows that are going to be eaten are different.

In still other cases, the problem with private labels is not that we don’t have enough information, but that we place too much trust in brands like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods without looking closely enough at the packaging. As one natural foods buyer explained to us over email, it’s important for customers to get really good at reading labels on store-brand products. “Turns out Whole Foods 365 frozen veggies were being made in China and labeled as organic (all of this was on the label just very small print),” she says. “Shoppers tend to shop at stores like Whole Foods or co-ops because they believe that the retailer has the shoppers’ best interests in mind and would not allow certain ingredients in their store or products made from China. This is not true. Know the food you eat, understand the ingredients and read the labels.”

We’ve put out a few calls to start looking into the organic beef story, and will report back on that. In the meantime, readers, if you’ve got any more leads, information, or sources to share, please continue to send them our way by either commenting here or emailing to investigations@thefastertimes.com.

To help get you started, following are links to a few handy resources:

Trader Joe’s contact page: This company’s main slogan is that it gives its customers what they want; if you’re a customer, ask to know more about where TJ’s private-label foods come from.

Cornucopia Institute: This is an organic foods watchdog group that has called out many of the private-label dairies for poor practices. Tons of their reports and findings are available online.

Wal-Mart – There’s a wealth of information out there about Wal-Mart’s love of store-brand items, including a 2006 BrandWeek studyconducted during the year when private-label really started to take off in the U.S.; a great Fortune article written last year when the store relaunched its “Great Value” brand; and an Advertising Age article in which Wal-Mart’s CMO defends the store’s shift to more private-label brands.

Private Label Magazine – The private-label industry is big enough to have its own magazine, which profiles a variety of retailers and their store brands.

Discussing the investigation on The Young Turks:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Q9Xi0Q6ys

Photo by foxypar4

The post Do You Know What’s In Your Organic Beef? The TFT Reader Investigation Continues… appeared first on The Faster Times.

“It is more expensive to run a “lesser grade” item, at a smaller quantity, than run a better grade in a larger quantity,” Sheryl Moore, of Escondido, Calif, who has been in the food manufacturing business for over 40 years, wrote to us.

Meanwhile, five other readers, some former employees of retail grocers, others friends of private-label producers, sent us the inside scoop on which private-label products are made by which manufacturers. The details are summarized in the table below:

As a general rule, the products made by manufacturers that also make a name-brand product tend to be the best value. Aurora Organic Dairy, which supplies both Safeway and Wal-Mart (as well as Target) with private-label organic milk, has been in trouble off and on since 2007 for violating various aspects of the USDA’s National Organic Program.

So far, what we’ve found indicates that private-label staples and some dairy products can be a great deal, but milk is a product to beware of, as are meat, cheese and eggs. We’ll be bringing you more information later this week.

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out some of our background resources (listed below), and please comment here or email investigations@thefastertimes.com if you’ve got information to share or a lead you think we should follow.

To help get you started, following are links to a few handy resources:

Trader Joe’s contact page: This company’s main slogan is that it gives its customers what they want; if you’re a customer, ask to know more about where TJ’s private-label foods come from.

Cornucopia Institute: This is an organic foods watchdog group that has called out many of the private-label dairies for poor practices. Tons of their reports and findings are available online.

Wal-Mart – There’s a wealth of information out there about Wal-Mart’s love of store-brand items, including a 2006 BrandWeek study conducted during the year when private-label really started to take off in the U.S.; a great Fortune article written last year when the store relaunched its “Great Value” brand; and an Advertising Age article in which Wal-Mart’s CMO defends the store’s shift to more private-label brands.

Private Label Magazine – The private-label industry is big enough to have its own magazine, which profiles a variety of retailers and their store brands.

Discussing the investigation on The Young Turks:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Q9Xi0Q6ys

The post Matching Private Labels to Their Name-Brand Equivalents – The TFT Reader Investigation Continues appeared first on The Faster Times.