Allen’s Update: July 10, 2014

New partnership announced between Animal Welfare Approved and Belcampo, Inc.

According to a recent press release, a new partnership has been announced between Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) and Belcampo, Inc. Belcampo is being billed as an innovator in sustainable meat production and marketing. Belcampo states that their high-welfare, sustainable model for grass based meat production will break the monopoly that large-scale meat production has on the U.S. meat industry. Company Founder and CEO, Anya Fernald, said, “Transparency is one of the guiding principles of the Belcampo business model and we wanted to partner with a program that upholds our strict environmental and animal-welfare standards”. The partnership with AWA requires that all animals be raised on pasture or range by independent farmers who are producing with the environment in mind. Fernald went on to state that, “We are honored to meet AWA’s exacting criteria and to have earned their highly regarded label certification”.

Belcampo, Inc. was established to make high-welfare, sustainably-farmed meat available to consumers on a large scale. To achieve this goal, the company has developed itself as a vertically-integrated business that includes Belcampo Meat Company, Belcampo Farms, and Belcampo Butchery. Their intent is to raise, slaughter, process, butcher, and market at retail, all the animals they raise on their farms. All meat products produced and sold by Belcampo will be organically raised from heritage breeds. They have 20,000 acres of organically certified land in Northern California. Their meat processing plant or “butchery” as they term it, is a USDA-inspected facility capable of multi-species processing. They currently have retail butcher shops open in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Marin.

Andrew Gunther, AWA Program Director, states that, “Belcampo is leading the food revolution from the front. Despite industry mantra that we need more feedlots and confinement feeding to feed the world, here we have a major company doing the complete opposite. Belcampo wants to achieve scale, but they also want true sustainability and transparency. It’s a complete new vision fo sustainable, large-scale food animal production, not just what farming could be, but what farming should be”. Gunther goes on to say, It is a testimony to AWA’s standing that an organization as focused and dynamic as Belcampo saw AWA as a natural partner to validate their farming systems. We have been impressed with the open dialogue and communication between our two organizations, and have worked closely with the Belcampo team over the last couple of years to put into practice the management changes necessary to comply with our exacting standards”.

There have been prior attempts by other programs at what Belcampo is trying to do, so it will be interesting to follow their development over the next few years. Will Belcampo be able to avoid the mistakes made by those who have come before and truly develop a unique model or will they become just another statistic? Only time will tell.

Food Poisoning Outbreak at Food Safety Summit

At the most recent Food Safety Summit held in Baltimore, MD more than 100 of the attendees developed symptoms of food poisoning. Symptoms included moderate to severe gastro-intestinal upset, with vomiting and diarrhea reported. There were more than 1100 people in attendance and only 400 have been contacted to date, so it is not known how many people were affected. Symptoms in those affected started within a day of attending the conference. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating. The irony is inescapable as the very people who are tasked with preventing food borne illness became victims themselves at a major Food Safety conference. Participants included many food and meat scientists from major universities, representatives of the FDA, USDA, and the CDC. Perhaps someone should have checked on the food handlers and preparers?

Only 10 Companies are Responsible for Most Food on Supermarket Shelves

A recent article in the Market Watch section of the Wall Street Journal reveals that as few as 10 major companies now control the vast majority of processed foods and beverages offered to consumers. Most American supermarkets now offer approximately 38,000 items with more than 80% of those items supplied by 10 major companies. According to Oxfam, the ten companies are Nestle, PepsiCo, General Mills, Coca Cola Co., Mondelez International, Mars, Danone, Unilever, Kellogg, and Associated British Foods. Most consumers would never realize that the majority of the processed foods and beverages they purchase are from just these ten companies as they are sold under a plethora of brand names. Oxfam International has an infographic available online that traces numerous brands to one of these 10 companies (an infographic by Oxfam International).