Food by Subscription

I was recently interviewed by the Atlanta Tribune for a story they were running on subscription-based services that deliver meal ingredients to your home.  

It was a bit ironic that this interview request came at this time because my family had recently been trying out one such service: HelloFresh.  Here's what I had to say about why we tried it out:

“My wife spent a large amount of time each week menu planning (i.e., figuring out what to cook for the week), and then even after getting the week planned out sometimes our local grocery store wouldn’t have all the items she needed. So, recently, she signed on to HelloFresh as a way to cut down on time spent searching for recipes and traipsing about town for different ingredients.”

Why is the market growing?

“In general, it’s hard to separate a short-term fad from a trend that has staying power. One thing to look at is the underlying economic forces and see whether there is reason to believe a larger market could exist.
...
Demand for convenience has grown. Demand for quality has grown. The subscriptions boxes offer convenience and quality, all in the comfort of one’s home. Typically one had to choose one or the other (e.g., I could have convenient but that would mean low quality or eating out), but boxes are an innovation that has broken down that traditional constraint. ”

On whether the market will continue to grow

“Hard to say. It will depend on the ability of the box services to continue to offer competitive offerings with grocery stores and restaurants, and it will depend on how these other food service outlets respond in turn. For example, restaurants already offer take out. And, what’s to stop Walmart or Kroger from offering their own boxes ready for pickup?”

Isn't this just a frivolous expense?

“Whether something is a “splurge” depends on one’s budget. . . The box service my family uses winds up costing us about $10 per person per meal. We could easily spend that amount if we went out to eat at a sit-down restaurant, and fast food is only slightly less expensive. Cooking from scratch would be less expensive in terms of food cost, but would require “hidden costs” in more time planning, shopping, and cooking. It’s unlikely that boxes are the best option for every family, but they’ll likely make sense for some families some of the time.”

Anti-GMO propaganda in most unlikely of places

The internet can be a dangerous place for kids.  That's why I was a bit worried when my son said to me today on the way to school: "you won't believe what I saw on Mom's computer."

I was only slightly relieved to hear that he had headed over to a web site a friend had told him about called bigdino.com that links to a bunch of kid's games.  Having talked with me several times about GMOs, he thought I'd be interested to know there were at least three games  at the website on the topic.   You can play the game "Harvest" - the goal of which is to "protect your barn from waves of GMO invaders" or play the games "Stop GMO" or "Stop GMO 2" (the later games seem to be made by a company called MyPlayYard games).

There are insightful images, such as this one of a rabbit pouring some toxic substance on carrots before you're thrown into a game where you're being chased by scary looking radishes and carrots where you must kill or be killed.  

Precondition a generation of kids to be fearful of GMOs, to learn to shoot first and ask questions later, and we wonder why it sometimes so hard to have reasonable discussions about biotechnology . . .

Local foods good for the environment?

A couple months ago the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a paper by Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell.  The paper was widely reported in the press.  For example the Washington Post the headline: As much as 90 percent of Americans could eat food grown within 100 miles of their home.  Another outlet: Most Americans could eat locally.  

I promptly wrote a blog post asking: even if Americans could eat locally, should they?  Shortly thereafter, I exchanged several emails with Pierre Desrochers, the author of the excellent book The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet.  We decided a more formal reply was warranted.  

I'm pleased to report that a couple days ago Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a letter by Pierre and me.

We write:

“In a recent paper, Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell (2015; Front Ecol Environ 13[5]: 244–248) present a simulation study that assesses the technological feasibility of providing enough local calories to feed every American. In so doing, they suggest turning back the clock on one of Homo sapiens sapiens’ greatest evolutionary achievements: the ability to trade physical goods over increasingly longer distances, producing an attending ever-widening division of labor (Horan et al. 2005). The main benefit of this process is that one hundred people who specialize and engage in trade end up producing and consuming far more than one hundred times what any one individual would achieve on his or her own. By spontaneously relocating food production to regions with higher biotic potential for specific types of crops and livestock in order to optimize the overall use of resources, trade and the division of labor have delivered more output at lower costs.

Zumkehr and Campbell largely sidestep these benefits. They cite a few studies suggesting that (re)localized food systems would deliver environmental, economic, food security, and social benefits, but neglect to mention critiques of those claims”

We offer these specific critiques of their model:

“We also take issue with the authors’ use of yield data from each county to infer the agricultural potential of each location. This approach suffers from selectivity bias; the effect of increasing local food production onto more marginal local lands will likely deliver less-productive results than current average yields. In a competitive market economy, observed crop yields near urban locations are likely to represent an upper bound for the overall level of productivity in the area because only lands productive enough to outcompete other uses are currently devoted to agricultural production. The authors are also silent on the environmental consequences of removing wildlife from current idle lands to make room for domesticated plants and animals.

Moreover, the authors exclude cost considerations and conclude that the “current foodshed potential of most US cities is not limited by current agronomic capacity or demographics to any great extent”, but rather by “social and economic” considerations. However, an economic barrier is just as real and restrictive as an agronomic one. Resource and budget constraints simply will not allow all wants and desires to be realized. It is all very well telling people with limited means to eat local cake, but they should also be told of its price tag.”

Animal-less Burgers

In my forthcoming book, Unnaturally Delicious, I've got a chapter on the promises and challenges of efforts underway to produce lab-grown meat.  My chapter focuses mainly on the efforts of a Dutch scientists, Mark Post.

This article in Tech Crunch discusses related efforts by a different group of scientists and investors.  

“Impossible Foods, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company at work on a new generation of meats and cheeses made entirely from plants, has raised $108 million in new funding from a powerful group of backers.

Investors in the round, which was led by UBS, include Viking Global Investors and earlier backers Khosla Ventures; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; and Horizons Ventures, which invests on behalf of Hong Kong business magnate Li Ka-shing.”

Those are some heavy hitters.  It will be interesting to see where it all goes.

Impact of Process Labeling

The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) just released a new paper on the impact of process food labeling.  The paper was written by a number of top-notch ag economists including Kent Messer, Marco Costanigro,  and Harry Kaiser.  It's a nice summary of the issues involved in the labeling of food processes (like organic or non-GMO or rbST free) as opposed to labeling food outcomes (like calories).

The summarize five points after reviewing the literature:

“1. Consumers want to have a sense of control over the foods their families eat.
2. Food markets are characterized by asymmetric information. Producers know more about the quality of the products than consumers. Many important quality traits are unknown until after consumption, or they are never revealed.
3. Consumers are not well informed about the various technologies used in the agricultural and food sector of the United States; however, they have greatly benefited from the tremendous technological progress that has occurred over the past century.
4. Consumers use process labels as cues to infer quality traits that are important to them, such as taste, food safety, and the environmental and societal impacts.
5. There is strong evidence that consumers consider process labels, frequently adjust their behavior in response to them, and, when these labels imply a negative aspect of a food, can shun that product. ”

They also present a number of challenges presented by these sorts of labels, such as

“Process labels can be used by marketers to stigmatize rival conventionally produced products, even when there is no scientific evidence that food produced in this manner
causes harm.”

The authors end with some policy recommendations.  Here's the first one:

“Mandatory labeling should only occur in situations in which the product has been scientifically demonstrated to harm human health.”