Corporate social responsibility and the chocolate supply chain

So Valentine’s Day is upon us so it seems worth thinking about an interesting supply chain story from Fortune (How Big Chocolate plans to save its cocoa supply, Feb 7). Apparently Hershey and other large confectionary firms are spending heavily in West Africa to help out cocoa farmers. They are targeting both working conditions (in particular, trying [...]

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Cranberries!

Call me old-school but I still love the HBS case on the National Cranberry Cooperative. Apparently, the folks at Fortune, also like old, dated write ups. About once a week, they post a classic article that has some relevance to the time of year or the week’s news. This week, they get to talking cranberries! [...]

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The Chinese want our nuts — specifically our pecans

“The Chinese want our nuts” — simply not a sentence that you expect to see in a major daily newspaper (assuming you still look at one of those) but there it is in the Wall Street Journal (Shell Shock: Chinese Demand Reshapes U.S. Pecan Business, Apr 18). In a nutshell, the story explains how the [...]

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Do you know where your raspberries have been?

Just how much information do you want to about your food? Are you happy knowing that your raspberries came from California or do you want to nail down that they are from just outside of Oxnard? The ability to know just where your food is from is the promise of a technology developed by HarvestMark [...]

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Kaizen and cloud computing for agriculture

Here is a curious article from the Wall Street Journal (Japanese Farms Look to the ‘Cloud‘, Jan 18). On the one hand, it is a novel application of “manufacturing logic” and some serious analytics. On the other, it seems the article was written with buzzword bingo in mind. The setting in question is Japanese agriculture, [...]

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Why do heritage turkeys cost so much?

It’s Thanksgiving so it is time to revisit the question of why heritage birds cost so much more than your standard supermarket bird. This year’s lesson in turkey economics comes from The Atlantic with a post by Bill Niman and Nicolette Hahn Niman of Niman Ranch fame (Heritage Turkeys: Worth the Cost?, Nov 18). Like [...]

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Tracking where food comes from

What is it worth to have visibility in a supply chain? When the consequence of screw ups can be catastrophic and deadly (think pharmaceuticals), it is worth tracking everything from raw materials through to consumption. So why are agricultural products any different? If anything, contaminated spinach or eggs can affect more people than any one [...]

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The logistics of India’s food

Here is an interesting supply chain challenge. India has a billion mouths to feed and a large agriculture sector but the process of getting food from field to consumer is hopelessly inefficient.

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