The Centra Foods sales team recently attended the National College & University Foodservice conference for the Pacific and Continental regions. On the first morning of the conference, I presented at one of the breakout sessions.

I talked about Leadership Transitioning — how to most efficiently and smoothly step into a new role and begin to make changes that positively affect (and sometimes completely re-direct) your company. For this conference, this discussion was related solely to college foodservice.

Have you turned over the back of a snack food bag lately? You’ll now find a whole army of claims and seals that wouldn’t have been there 10 years ago. These claims border the line between quality seals and marketing descriptors, and help back up the quality of the food inside.

Why so many claims? This is something that’s picked up over the last few years as quality seals have increased in importance and more and more people hold allegiance to a certain type of diet like vegan or paleo.

Today I’m going to go through a list of the most common quality claims, so that you can both understand what’s commonplace in the industry and determine if you’re missing any marketing opportunities or quality seals that your product should be taking advantage of.

Should your healthy food company exhibit at Expo West or the Fancy Food Show? Perhaps both?

These two trade shows cater to the natural and specialty food industry here on the west cost. The question of which show to attend is typical for any marketing and sales team selling (or trying to sell) into Whole Foods Market or the natural section of any grocery store.

If you’re just starting to grow a young food company and comparing these two options, we’ll help you run through the pros and cons of each and compare these two popular food industry trade shows.

If you are buying a solid oil like organic coconut or organic palm oil and you’re getting it in a 55 gallon drum, you may encounter a predicament when you begin your production: how do you get this solid oil (often the consistency of butter) out of it’s packaging?

Unless you are buying smaller pails with a lid that you can pull off completely, “scooping” the oil out isn’t always an option. Many drums that have a solid oil inside require that you heat the oil first to melt it and turn it into a liquid to get it out.

What’s the best way to heat it? There are many different options, and I met with our production manager, Kevin Smith, who made a number of good suggestions. Here is what he recommends for those of you trying to melt your solid oil for the first time.

Vermont is the first state to pass a law requiring foods sold within it’s borders to have GMOs labeled.

This law, which originally passed in 2014, will go into effect on July 1, 2016. This small law is creating big ripples, and with the July deadline looming, major food manufacturers are changing their packaging to include voluntary GMO labeling on a national scale to meet Vermont’s requirements.

Why not make the change for just the food they sell in Vermont? The current retail distribution system is set up on a national scale: manufacturers sell to distributors, and these distributors sell to many different retailers throughout the US. Any state-specific labeling changes would add big costs both in packaging and in the segregation systems that would be required throughout the distribution channels.

This means that the laws for this one tiny state has made big food manufacturers go through some major labeling changes. Even though a national GMO labeling law hasn’t passed through federal government, the requirement for this one state is essentially having the same effect as a national requirement, and large brands are preparing for the changes they will have to make.

Working directly with restaurants and manufacturers we’ve noticed that the demand for Rice Bran Oil has skyrocketed in the last 3 years, especially for use in frying. Why is that? Well, there’s many reasons.

A consumer focus on healthier foods (especially oils) has caused restaurants to look for heart healthy, naturally GMO free options like Rice Bran Oil that have long shelf lives, hold up to commercial frying and are still economical.

This March, Natural Products Expo West had another record setting year with 6.9% growth, and hosting more than 77,000 attendees. This event brought together an inspired community of industry members and more than 3,000 exhibiting companies, including more than 600 first-time exhibitors.

As an exhibitor and attendee myself, this is one of my favorite food industry shows, and is, in my opinion, the best place to be if you are launching a new food brand into the natural foods market, or if you have any desire to sell to Whole Foods or Costco in the future.

If you are getting your retail food product certified organic, you’ll want to figure out which level of organic certification your product will quality for and determine what your marketing/quality goals are.

There are four options for organic claims — two of them are allowed to use the USDA Organic Seal on their packaging, and two of them are not.

What is Olive Pomace Oil really? And how is it different from regular olive oil?

Answering those questions require defining exactly what olive oil is and the process of how it is made. It’s actually easiest to explain exactly what extra virgin olive oil is, then olive oil, then the olive pomace oil. This is because most people don’t know that plain old “olive oil” isn’t just olive oil — it’s actually a refined, lower grade version of EVOO.

My best explanation comes in visual form. Here is a flip-book presentation that I created a few years ago to help explain the differences between each of the grades.

Over the next few months, we will be giving you a sneak peak into the the lives of our team members: who they are, why they love the work that they do, and what they're passionate about.

Today, I'd like you to meet Alexa Ketterling.  She works in Sales & Marketing with Centra Foods, working with customers on a daily basis and helping to manage our social media presence.

The article was originally published on FoodDive here, and was written by Carolyn Heneghan.

The industry is exploring how organic and non-GMO products are impacting sales for major manufacturers, particularly those that produce processed foods. Announcements from major manufacturers like McCormick, which has committed to transitioning 80% of its products to organic and non-GMO by 2016, and Campbell, which will begin labeling GMO ingredients and already offers organic products, have turned the spotlight back on what organic and non-GMO products mean for bigger food and beverage companies.

But how do the sales of organic and non-GMO foods impact each other? Do they grow in tandem, or does the growth of one segment stifle the growth of the other? Knowing these answers could help manufacturers decide whether they want to pursue producing organic products, non-GMO products, or neither.

This article was originally published by Centra Foods in 2014, and has been re-published with updated information here.

Sometimes, it's hard to know exactly what kind of oil is going to work best. If you're in the R&D stages of a new product, you'll be faced with decisions about choosing the right bulk ingredients. Sometimes, as you begin to narrow down your search, you may be presented with more and more challenging questions.

Let’s pretend you’ve finally made the decision to go with Sunflower Oil. Next, you’ll be immediately presented with a new question:

What kind of Sunflower Oil would you like?

Certain oils, especially seed oils, come in a few varieties. For sunflower oil, there’s three main types: high oleic, mid oleic and linoleic.

As a sourcing or procurement manager, you may think there’s nothing new about supplier collaboration. Your chief procurement officer (CPO) most likely disagrees.

A key part of R&D’s role is choosing the right ingredients for the job. If you (or your marketing team) is set on using olive oil, you will need to decide which grade is right for what you’re trying to accomplish.

Two of the most common grades are Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Pure Olive Oil (also called just ‘Olive Oil’).

There are a few key differences between these two types of olive oil when you look at them from your R&D or corporate chef’s eye’s. There’s also a few differences in how these grades are priced, which you should understand if you’re on the purchasing side of things.

The USDA Organic and the Non-GMO Project Verification are two distinctly different quality seals, though they both address somewhat related quality control concerns.