Search Results for: food

BY KEITH NUTHALL
HAVING a crystal ball can be useful and profitable for confectionary businesses wanting to know what investments they may need to comply with future regulations and best practice.

Question is how to acquire such intelligence? One tactic is to exploit globalisation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FOOD businesses have been asked to assess the suitability of a new streamlined European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) system checking whether microorganisms used in food are harmful. This Qualified Presumption of Safety (QPS) procedure would assess the safety of groups of microorganisms, regardless of their use in food or animal feed, rather than specific strains.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IT is maybe reassuring that during an era when confectionary companies must increasingly grapple with often complex global and regional cross-border trade, health, packaging and marketing regulations, there is one international organisation that actually designs rules with their practical use in mind.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IN today’s highly competitive energy sector, oil and gas companies and their suppliers are always looking for an edge over rivals, especially in technology. So it can only be good news that the European Union (EU) will from this year until 2013 be spending Euro 2.3 billion on energy studies through its ‘seventh framework programme’, its largest ever research spending scheme, commanding budgets worth Euro 53.2 billion in total.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
HAVING a crystal ball can be useful for environmental health teams wanting to get ahead of the game and know what regulatory changes might be coming in a few years time. But how can they achieve such prescience?…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE FOOD industry has helped forge a plan to push governments into fighting product counterfeiting more effectively. The Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP) group (launched by the International Chamber of Commerce) will coordinate actions this year, which – said the chamber – will “ensure policymakers have sufficient information to make decisions, implement policies and apportion resources; and compel national governments to implement legislation protecting intellectual property (IP)….”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE FOOD industry will have to ensure that most of its waste in future is not landfilled, if changes to a proposed European Union (EU) waste directive by the European Parliament are accepted by EU ministers. The parliament has beefed up this legislation to insist no recyclable waste be landfilled by 2020 across the EU and that landfilling of paper, glass, textiles, plastic and metal is banned by 2015, leaving precious little for food manufacturers and retailers to dump.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Doha Development Round liberalisation talks have been re-launched, following informal agreement by trade ministers on how to proceed. They have decided to change tack and focus on agreeing duty cuts to individual products, before setting an overall cut for food and industrial tariffs and subsidies.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels
THE EUROPEAN Commission’s proposal to simplify the organisation for milk and dairy products, announced last month, is already having profound effects on the industry says Dr Joop Kleibeuker, Secretary General of the Brussels-based European Dairy Association in an exclusive interview with just-food.com.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE DOHA Development Round talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have restarted in earnest, following their suspension last summer, WTO director general Pascal Lamy announced today. Speaking to the WTO general council in Geneva, he said: “We have resumed our negotiations fully across the board”, notably the food trade talks for which tactics were agreed at the recent Davos World Economic Forum.…