Comfortable and Safe Food processors are reporting brisk sales of their processed products. Nestlé’s Hot Pockets are selling lot hot cakes; Nielsen reports that canned soup sales are up 37 percent, canned meat rose 60 percent and frozen pizza is up 51 percent. Products that were mocked pre-coronavirus as unhealthy are now serving as “comfort” foods. Science author George Zaidan says have no fear. More than half our calories come from ultra-processed foods and there is no evidence when using the best scientific methods to prove they are harmful. Zaidan notes that most of the reports calling these foods harmful are derived from flawed prospective cohort studies and other non-robust methods. Processing your dinner fro...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.