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Food Safety Summit pt 2
Posted on May 30, 2018
By far the highlight of Day 2 of the 2018 Food Safety Summit (FSS) in Rosemont, IL was a presentation by Carletta Ooton, Amazon VP, Health & Safety, Sustainability, Security & Compliance – a job title she referred to as a “gigantic hat to wear” – on a topic equally as verbose: ‘Amazon’s Approach to Innovation and What It Means for Food Safety’.
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Marketing in Milan
Posted on May 30, 2018
After attending the recent Seeds and Chips conference in Milan, I had the enviable burden of waiting a day to catch a flight back to New Zealand. Eschewing fashion for food I decided to maximise my time in Italy’s stylish capital by attending a cooking course.
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Food Safety Summit pt 1
Posted on May 23, 2018
Held at the enormous Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the tulip-covered Chicago suburb of Rosemont, IL, the 2018 Food Safety Summit was occasionally informative, good for networking, self-reverential as hell, and oddly subdued – perhaps because the bulk of attendees consider ‘food safety’ a cost burden rather than an aspiration.
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Power differentials, culture and food integrity.
Posted on May 23, 2018
I have many theories about food systems. It’s fair to say I have had an interesting career. Though I escaped academia after the powers-that-be thought my proposal to investigate how young people were using the World Wide Web (as it was called back in 2006) was not worth the time or effort, sometimes..
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Hope in the heartland.
Posted on May 23, 2018
n any authoritative history of the United States, the reign of Chicago as the meatpacking center of the expanding country from the Civil War to the 1920s is critical.
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Fear the robots (?)
Posted on May 23, 2018
Much is made of the rise of the robots. How our mundane tasks will be farmed out to android underlings. How jobs will be lost and (eventually) humans themselves will become redundant (ok, that’s a stretch, but it doesn’t stop conspiracy theorists from peddling the notion). How the fictions of the ‘Terminator’ films will become fact.
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Groundhog Day
Posted on May 11, 2018
This is not the first time I have written on this subject; perhaps the title should be ‘The Return of Groundhog Day’. Regardless, I think it is worthy to revisit the consistently disturbing trend of our words indicating a desire to improve supply chains while our actions suggest a lack of total commitment. Why might this be?
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Starstruck by Starbucks
Posted on May 09, 2018
For some time a book about Starbucks - 'Everything But the Coffee’ – has sat upon the ‘to read’ pile on my desk. Today in Milan I had
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Clash of the coffee cultures
Posted on Apr 24, 2018
The Sumfood office is multicultural. A quality universally recognised as positive, if not essential, in 2018. Sumfood multiculturalism, however, has a caveat, a schism, a big ol' crack down the middle: We have two very different belief systems when it comes to coffee.
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Day 2: GMA Science Forum
Posted on Apr 16, 2018
Sumfood is a startup based in Auckland, NZ. We're well-educated and well-traveled, with an eclectic mix of professional experience, data science wizardry and food industry insight. In other words, we're not your average band of food safety/transparency warriors.