World Perspectives

Drop in Food Borne Illnesses

At least anecdotally, some food industry lawyers report a drop-off in food borne illness litigation cases this year. Official data is reported by the Centers for Disease Control annually, but litigants are a proxy for industry developments. Part of the reason could be the switch in consumption to homes instead of restaurants and bars (see graph below).  Historically, most cases occur in the home or in local food establishments. Those occurring in homes are more difficult to track since reporting is less concise. Some warn that the coronavirus has become a statistical catch-all for many unrelated illnesses, which means a food borne pathogen may have been confused for the coronavirus. It may also be the case that plaintiffs’ attor...

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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.

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