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.

Are you new to industrial oil totes? If you’ve only worked with smaller sizes like drums or jugs before, industrial totes can feel both large and overwhelming.

In light of that, I’d like to show you a few videos, filmed in our warehouse in Kent, WA. In the video, you’ll see our Production Manager, Kevin Smith show you how to attach the dispensing valves, how the cardboard and plastic totes may dispense differently and other details on how to set up totes in your facility.

Kevin is the king when it comes to knowing how to use these totes: he runs all of our packing and production in-house and knows this type of packaging inside and out.

Everyone in the food industry that I know is stressed — busy, happy (and meaningfully) stressed. This can be a blessing and a curse. It means that there’s lots to be done, with great opportunities to make change in your company and affect the food industry for the better… but there’s still LOTS to be done.

When our plates are overwhelmed with work, were often overly stressed as well.

If you’re in the food industry, here’s 10 ways that you can take a load off and reduce your stress — without losing your edge — in your job.

Current logistics and supply chain management trends are discussed very often on social media sites. How can we identify them really? This article will show you some trends in the past and reveal what the future holds.

Background
Expert opinions appear to be the most important source of information for a trend prediction. In the year 2000, Journal of Business Logistics published the article named "Ten Mega-Trends That Will Revolutionize Supply Chain Logistics". The authors of this article are the late Donald Bowersox, David Closs and Theodore Stank (at that time all of them were at Michigan State University). The purpose of this article was to identify the paradigm shifts the authors observed from the way leading companies transformed their supply chain capabilities which were the results of the change of information technology. Ten megatrends can be summarized as below,

1) the shift from customer service to relationship management
2) more collaborative behavior
3) demand sharing creates the higher level of a joint business planning
4) new business environment requires a rapid change in processes and practices
5) focus on the bottom-line changes to focus on the value creation
6) internal functions are more integrated
7) virtual integration replaces the vertical integration
8) companies share more information with trading partners
9) multi-skilled employees are required
10) economic value added concept are more prevalent

Some of these trends have become the realities, depending on where you are in the supply chain.

What's Next?
Since the technologies change faster than ever and the scope of supply chain management is expanding, it's absolutely important for supply chain practitioners to capture the trends from the overall business landscape. In order to achieve this objective, we conduct a literature review and find an interesting article named "Agent of Change: the Future of Technology Disruption in Business" published by Intelligence Unit of "The Economist" in 2012. It's the result of a global survey of more than 500 executives conducted in 2011 + a series of in-depth interviews with thinkers from various industries about the future and business model in the year 2020. More details can be found as below,

If you are a food service distributor (or a customer of a distributor) you may have wondered if there’s an easier way to dispense from your 35 Lb. Containers, other than picking up the jug and pouring it.

I’ve tried to do that, and it’s always an awkward ordeal — you’ve got to muscle the box up to your measuring bowl, and your arms are straining to control the flow. After just a few days, this system can get tiresome and may have you searching for a better process.

The good news is that there IS a better way, and it’s really quite simple.

Is time management important to your business and your life? This article will show you 10 best time management books that get the attentions of leading CEOs.

Supply Chain Opz conducted a survey with CEOs to learn more about their favorite time management books.  

Here's a list of some of the top CEOs' favorite books to help you structure your time better and be more productive.

This article was originally a case study published by Omega-9 Oils, and is printed here with permission. Their canola seed, used to produce the oil that this article refers to, is now available from Centra Foods in a non-GMO form as Non-GMO High Oleic Canola Oil.

At the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the dining services team grade themselves on creating cravable experiences and making student health a priority. Kenneth Toong, Director of Dining Services, is constantly seeking ways to improve the nutritional and flavor profiles of the 4,000 recipes in his six campus dining establishments. Making the switch to Omega-9 Oils was an “A” move in his book.

In 2008, he reviewed research from the Harvard School of Public Health that stated 120,000 to 228,000 heart attacks could be averted each year by reducing trans fats in the diet. As a result, Toong began looking for ways to reduce or eliminate trans fat from University of Massachusetts’ menus. With a health profile including zero trans fat, the lowest amount of saturated fats and high monounsaturated fats, Omega-9 Oils provided Toong and his team the ideal healthier oil solution.