Chemically Named Europe’s wine grape growers are complaining that EU regulations prohibit them from using the fungicide sodium hydrogen carbonate. It was approved as a basic substance but then a manufacturer incorporated it as the active ingredient in a manufactured product and EU regulations required farmers to purchase the more expensive active ingredient rather than the basic substance. Sodium hydrogen carbonate, also known as baking soda will likely get a reprieve but the case reinforces some of the absurdities in food safety laws. This flawed criticism is now also the case for food ingredients in the U.S. that have historically been categorized as generally regarded a safe (GRAS) but are now vilified by supporters of RFK, J...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.