ReportWire

Tag: food supply

  • How Chemical Transparency Builds Consumer Trust 

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    The chemical industry is at a turning point. What used to be casual consumer curiosity about ingredients has become a non-negotiable demand for complete transparency. This shift is fundamentally changing how every business that deals with chemicals operates, and companies that don’t adapt are getting left behind. 

    After serving over 90,000 customers through Lab Alley, I can tell you this isn’t a trend that will reverse itself. It’s the new baseline for doing business. But here’s what most companies miss: Transparency isn’t just about avoiding problems anymore. It’s become a growth driver. 

    Why transparency is reshaping consumer expectations 

    The transparency revolution stems from several converging forces, though digital connectivity might be the biggest game-changer. According to research from Commport, 62 percent of online shoppers will not buy from companies with incorrect product data, and consumers now have unprecedented access to product information. 

    Regulatory changes have also accelerated these demands. The FDA’s recent Chemical Contaminants Transparency Tool signals government commitment to what HHS Secretary Kennedy calls “radical transparency” that extends beyond traditional disclosure requirements. 

    Then there’s the generational shift. The Commport research also shows that 94 percent of consumers are more likely to remain loyal to brands offering complete transparency, with 56 percent saying that such transparency would make them “loyal for life.” This impact is stronger among specific demographics: 90 percent of millennial respondents would buy from a company they see as purposeful, while 45 percent of Gen Z shoppers are more interested in brands they think are trustworthy. These statistics represent the future of purchasing power in both consumer and business markets. 

    What transparency looks like in chemicals 

    Chemical transparency goes beyond disclosing ingredient lists. It means giving access to comprehensive documentation, robust verification systems, and clear communication about how products are developed, manufactured, and distributed.  

    This begins with precise specifications disclosures. Rather than broad categorizations like “industrial grade,” both consumer brands and B2B customers now expect detailed purity percentages, moisture content specifications, and comprehensive impurity profiles. Take our USP-grade glycerin. We provide detailed certificates of analysis showing exact purity levels, specific gravity measurements, and chloride content specifications. 

    Geographic sourcing has become just as important. With the U.S. imported approximately $320 billion in chemical products annually (as of 2019), customers increasingly request complete country-of-origin documentation and alternative sourcing options. B2B buyers need this information for risk assessment and compliance with their own transparency commitments. 

    Certifications as trust signals 

    Third-party certifications used to be nice extras that companies could add if they wanted to stand out. Not anymore. Today, they’re essential for building trust between what suppliers claim and what customers actually believe. The certifications that really matter for transparency include: 

    Kosher and Halal certifications signal stricter manufacturing processes and appeal to both religious and secular markets. USP verification ensures you meet pharmaceutical-grade standards for purity and consistency. RSPO certification addresses the sustainability concerns around palm oil derivatives that customers increasingly demand. Organic certification meets the growing push for naturally-derived ingredients, while ISO certifications demonstrate you have comprehensive quality management systems in place. 

    Each certification requires rigorous third-party auditing and ongoing compliance, but provides customers with verified assurance that products meet specific standards without requiring independent verification. 

    Industries driving the demand 

    As of 2025, three industries are driving transparency standards across the entire supply chain, and their requirements are quickly becoming benchmarks for other sectors. 

    Food and beverage manufacturing: This has become a demanding sector, reformulating products for cleaner labels and creating pressure for ingredients with consumer-friendly names like “cultured wheat extract” instead of “potassium sorbate.” They need batch-level tracking, shelf-life documentation, and comprehensive allergen information because one contamination incident can trigger widespread recalls.  

    Cosmetics and personal care: These companies are responding to the clean beauty movement by seeking natural alternatives to synthetic ingredients. The EU’s cosmetics regulations have established global transparency standards that affect suppliers worldwide. 

    Pharmaceutical manufacturing: This sector has expanded transparency demands beyond regulatory compliance to include comprehensive risk management and supply chain security, requiring detailed supplier qualifications and facility inspection information. 

    Risks versus benefits 

    The contrast between companies that embrace transparency and those that resist it has become stark, with measurable business consequences. 

    Risks of opacity: Companies resisting transparency face escalating risks. According to the Commport research, businesses that cannot provide comprehensive product documentation are being eliminated from procurement processes before price discussions even begin. 

    Regulatory agencies are implementing increasingly stringent disclosure requirements, and supply chain vulnerabilities without detailed supplier information can cause production delays and permanent customer relationship damage. 

    Benefits of openness: That 94 percent consumer loyalty statistic translates directly to business performance. Our customer retention exceeds 95 percent among accounts receiving comprehensive transparency documentation, with these customers consistently expanding their purchase volumes over time.  

    Beyond loyalty, transparent companies command premium pricing through documented value propositions while gaining access to new markets through verified certifications. The operational benefits are equally compelling; transparency systems dramatically reduce customer service inquiries and shorten sales cycles by giving buyers immediate access to the information they need. 

    Build your transparency strategy 

    Start with comprehensive documentation systems, including complete records of sourcing, manufacturing processes, and quality control procedures. If you can’t document it, you can’t be transparent about it.  

    Then, focus certification programs on credentials that provide the greatest market access for your target markets. Finally, ensure organizational commitment through training programs that help employees understand how their roles contribute to transparency objectives. 

    The path forward 

    Chemical transparency has evolved from consumer preference to business imperative. At Lab Alley, our transparency commitment has enabled rapid growth while building deep customer relationships based on trust and verified performance. This approach requires ongoing investment, but the returns through customer loyalty, market access, and operational efficiency continue to exceed our expectations. 

    The chemical industry’s transparency revolution is accelerating. Companies that embrace this change will thrive in the evolving marketplace; those that resist will find themselves competing on price alone in a market that increasingly values verified quality and comprehensive documentation.  

    The opportunity is clear. Will your company lead this transformation or follow others who recognized transparency as the competitive advantage it has become? 

    The final deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, December 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Fred Elabed

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  • Opinion: California didn’t ban Skittles. But it tackled a food safety problem the FDA hasn’t solved

    Opinion: California didn’t ban Skittles. But it tackled a food safety problem the FDA hasn’t solved

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    Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law California’s Food Safety Act banning four ingredients that are linked to health risks. These substances — red dye no. 3, propyl paraben, brominated vegetable oil and potassium bromate, currently found in some candies, sodas and baked goods — will not be allowed in the state’s foods starting in 2027. All four are banned from foods in the European Union (which only allows red no. 3 in candied and cocktail cherries), but, California aside, they remain perfectly legal in the U.S.

    New York is considering a similar law that would also ban a fifth substance previously included in California’s law — titanium dioxide, which is used in Skittles. That’s why the California measure got dubbed the “Skittles ban” (a name that stuck even after titanium dioxide was cut from the draft).

    California is the first state to go beyond Food and Drug Administration regulations by banning the other four additives. Should it have deferred to the FDA?

    The challenges facing the FDA make the case for state action. Sluggish and irregular safety reviews, a fast-track ingredient approval loophole that is abused by manufacturers, and a focus on acute food poisoning over long-term diet all hinder the agency’s ability to address the growing risks associated with our food supply.

    The FDA is required to review the safety of any new food additive and grant approval before it can be used. If evidence indicates that an additive is unsafe, the FDA is supposed to decline or limit its use. Three of the substances in California’s law were approved by this standard review: potassium bromate, Red Dye No. 3 and brominated vegetable oil. But the FDA is reevaluating the safety of the latter two and has proposed, though not finalized, a rule to ban brominated vegetable oil from the food supply.

    The fourth substance set to be banned in California, propyl paraben, was approved through what’s effectively a loophole in the FDA system. Ingredients classified as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) are exempt from the additive category and thus from careful FDA review. Congress crafted this exemption to be used infrequently, primarily to keep common ingredients like salt and spices on the market without an onerous approval process. But as food companies sought to avoid the rigorous food additive review, GRAS applications piled up.

    Without the resources to research the applications, and lacking further support from Congress, the FDA allowed manufacturers to skip the application and determine GRAS status with only a “voluntary notification process.” This means companies can choose whether to let the FDA know they believe their substance is GRAS — in which case FDA can affirm that decision — or they can self-affirm GRAS status and market the substance without ever notifying the FDA. Thousands of substances have entered the food supply this way. Even when companies voluntarily notify, as was the case for propyl paraben in 1984, the FDA does not conduct a full safety review to affirm GRAS status.

    Since GRAS notification is voluntary, the FDA does not know all the substances in our food supply. One study found that of the 4,284 GRAS determinations made as of January 2011, just 582 were cleared through the FDA’s voluntary notification process.

    Although the FDA has the authority to revoke GRAS status or an additive approval, the agency reviews the safety of greenlighted ingredients sporadically, rather than regularly — and often slowly.

    Take for example, trans fat from partially hydrogenated oils, a GRAS substance used for decades in commercial baked goods and other products. A 2004 citizen petition asked the FDA to look into the safety of these oils, but it wasn’t until 2015 that the FDA determined that they were not GRAS and banned them in food starting in 2020. By the time the FDA got around to this, New York City had already banned them in restaurants (in 2006), as had California (in 2008).

    The under-regulation of food additives is part of a larger challenge. FDA vetting focuses more on acute risks, such as food-borne illness, than on longer-term risks from diet. Of the agency’s more than $1 billion budget for its foods program, only 7% goes to nutrition and labeling, its major strategies to address diet-related disease. Yet while foodborne illness causes about 3,000 deaths per year, 1.5 million deaths in 2018 — more than half of all deaths that year — resulted from conditions linked to diet.

    But states moving to ban substances isn’t a perfect solution either. They generally don’t have the resources to conduct comprehensive safety reviews, and it would be more efficient to beef up the FDA’s infrastructure than to duplicate costly systems across states and potentially create a confusing patchwork of bans.

    We desperately need change at the federal level. The Government Accountability Office reported on flaws in the GRAS system in 2010, and the FDA has not addressed the majority of the recommendations, such as regularly reviewing the safety of GRAS substances and requiring companies to provide basic information about these substances. The FDA urgently needs additional Congressional funding to take action on food safety for all ingredients, with a particular eye toward diet-related chronic disease.

    In the meantime, states like California will have to keep taking the lead on evaluating harmful ingredients and show the federal government how it can be done.

    Emily Broad Leib is a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the school’s Food Law and Policy Clinic.

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    Emily Broad Leib

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  • Our Food Is Getting Sweeter, Changing Appetites

    Our Food Is Getting Sweeter, Changing Appetites

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    Nov. 14, 2022 – When Cherie Russell’s husband brought home a bottle of jarred marinara sauce from the grocery story with a label advertising less sugar, he thought he had made a healthy choice.

    But when Russell, a food researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, looked more closely at the label, she saw that artificial sweetener replaced some of the sugar in the tomato sauce. And while she didn’t want to eat sugar in her pasta dinner later, she didn’t want to have artificial sweetener either.

    Russell says she’s worried about how safe it is to consume too many sugar alternatives. A recent study of more than 100,000 people published in the British Medical Journal showed an link between artificial sweetener and heart disease and stroke.

    Previous research has also suggested that sugar substitutes alter gut microbiomes.

    Russell realized that policymakers often focus on a specific aspect of a food, such as its fat, sugar, or calorie count, rather than on its sweetness or nutritional value overall.

    Like Russell and her husband in Australia, many Americans are  trying to consume less sugar for health reasons. ––Purchases of foods and beverages with added sugars declined in many households, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of the Academy of Dietetics and Nutrition.

    Russell had read the reports that some segments of the population were moving away from sugar-sweetened beverages, but she wanted to know about their whole diet, not just drinks. What’s more, she wanted to know whether consumers were eating fewer sweet foods overall or were replacing sugar with other sweeteners.

    Measuring how much sugar a food contains and how much of it is sold in various parts of the world is relatively straightforward. Measuring how sweet a food is without relying on its sugar count is much more difficult. Take tonic water – it often contains as much sugar as juice or regular soda – but the presence of bitter quinine can mask the sweetness.

    Russell and her team went about their work by measuring both regular sugar and other sweeteners added to food and beverages. Their results show the per capita volume of calorie-free sweeteners in beverages increased by 36% from 2007-2018. While sugars in beverages declined by 22% in upper-income countries, it rose as much as 40% in low- and middle-income countries.

    “Our food supply is getting sweeter, which is hugely concerning,” Russell says. “Even if we are consuming less added sugars, the food we’re consuming is still sweeter than it used to be a decade ago.”

    That matters, she points out, both due to ongoing concerns about the safety and benefit of many low- and no-calorie sugar alternatives and how overly sweet foods may be training future generations for a penchant for sugar.

    Craving More

    There is an important biological reason we crave sweet things that helped people survive in times when food wasn’t readily available. Sweet foods usually have more calories in them, and the body needs calories to function. But in our modern food system, it is probably easier to name items without added sugar because most everything else has sugar or sweeteners. Vegetables have small amounts of natural sugars. And other options like fruit, milk and honey have higher amounts of natural sugars.

    From the age of two, an American child is reportedly more likely to consume a sugar-sweetened product than a fruit or vegetable on any given day. It is a troubling statistic, report researchers who suggest that food preferences are established early in childhood and there is a strong link between dietary habits and the risk of developing chronic illnesses.

    Links between early-life sugar consumption and adult intake are less clear. “The data are very messy, but there’s no clear association between intake of sweet foods and the development of a sweet food preference,” says Kelly Higgins, a dietitian at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

    She is currently planning a clinical trial to see whether switching to low-calorie sweeteners will alter someone’s sugar preferences long-term.

    Replacing Fat and Cholesterol with Sugar

    Several decades ago, as nutrition studies raised concerns about the fat and cholesterol in the modern diet, food manufacturers responded. Heeding consumer demand, they replaced saturated fats with sugars and trans-fats to be able to affix labels that said, “Low in fat and low in saturated fats” on packaging. 

    From a marketing standpoint, the strategy was a success. From a nutritional standpoint, however, it was a major failure. Subsequent studies showed that the health consequences of saturated fats were far less than the impact of even small amounts of trans fats.

    Then there were the extra sugars, added to preserve a food’s flavor and texture once fats were reduced or removed. This shift towards added sugars dovetailed with a global increase in processed food consumption. This meant that sugars were making up a larger portion of the average person’s diet than ever before, says Barry Popkin, PhD, a nutrition epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Popkin has spent his career studying diet and sugar intake around the world and says sugar consumption is going up everywhere. “We really shifted to more highly processed or ultra-processed foods, and they’re high in added sugars.”

    One of the biggest challenges of lowering amounts of added sugars in food is that we really like our food sweet. And while studies have shown that reducing the sodium in food will make a person more sensitive to salt and help them more easily reduce the amount they eat, the same doesn’t happen when lowering the amount of sugar. The sweet tooth remains just as strong no matter how much sugar is reduced.

    Synthetic Sugar Substitutes

    People watching their waistlines have been looking for shortcuts to dieting for years. After World War II, the food industry introduced several new synthetic sugar substitutes to give health-conscious consumers the opportunity to tickle their taste buds without the added calories of sugar. 

    Artificial sweeteners like saccharin and aspartame, along with later additions such as sucralose and acesulfame potassium rapidly gained acceptance. More recently, sugar substitutes like stevia, monk fruit, and agave have eclipsed their first-generation counterparts in popularity. Manufacturers turned to these alternatives to meet consumer pressures for lower sugars while also keeping the sweet taste that drove sales.

    “Some of our policies may have unintended consequences that may end up being worse than the problem we’re trying to solve,” Russell says.

    Popkin says that artificial sweeteners are probably safe in moderate amounts – especially when compared to sugar itself.

    Still, Russell says exposure to highly processed, overly sweetened foods shapes a person’s lifelong palate. This could be setting us up for a lifetime of health issues, she says. We will benefit from a healthier, less-processed diet, she adds.

    “If we consume less sugar, what are we going to replace it with,” Higgins asks. “We need to understand the downstream effects.”

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  • Without Action, Water Shortages Will Lead to Less Food Production, Food Shortages, and Price Hikes

    Without Action, Water Shortages Will Lead to Less Food Production, Food Shortages, and Price Hikes

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    Water shortages that continue to plague California are increasingly affecting the number of acres devoted to growing our food.

    Press Release
    –

    May 16, 2022


    SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 16, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Water shortages that continue to plague California are increasingly affecting the number of acres devoted to growing much of the nation’s fresh food, according to the California Farm Water Coalition. Farmers are making tough choices on which crops to grow and how much to plant in the face of crushing water supply cuts.

    “New estimates are emerging on the number of acres without enough water to grow food and it doesn’t look good,” said Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition. “We believe the state could see as much as 691,000 acres taken out of production this year, a 75 percent increase over last year and 151,000 acres more than the previous high in 2015.”

    Critical for consumers are the crops that won’t make it to the grocery store because of insufficient water supplies. Fresh fruits and vegetables, along with strawberries, citrus, peaches, broccoli, rice, and tomatoes for things like pizza sauce and salsa, are among the crops impacted when farm water supplies are cut off. It’s estimated that up to 40 percent of California’s irrigated cropland will receive little or no surface water this year.

    “When people talk about taking millions of acres of California farmland out of production, those are just numbers. To put that into perspective, every acre that is left unplanted because of a lack of irrigation water, it is the equivalent of 50,000 salads that will not be available to consumers,” said Bill Diedrich, president of the California Farm Water Coalition.

    In addition to less food in our grocery stores, it’s expected that the number of job losses on the state’s farms will approach 25,000 with an economic hit to the State of about $3.4 billion.

    Data from the United States Department of Food and Agriculture show that 80% of U.S.-produced fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown West of the Rockies.

    “It is not an accident that so much of our food supply comes from the West and in particular, California,” said Diedrich. “California’s climate is unique and not replicated in any other state. Most other states have more significant weather extremes, higher altitudes, oppressive humidity, and in some cases, too much water.

    “California’s Mediterranean climate lends itself to abundant food production. If we abandon that, we’re accepting food shortages, higher prices, and more imports from foreign countries, many with significantly lower safety standards.

    “California has failed to adapt to changing weather patterns. Because more of our precipitation now comes in the form of rain, instead of snow, we need to build both small and large storage projects to capture the water when Mother Nature delivers it.

    “Both the federal and state government have allocated money for water infrastructure, but it moves too slowly. A clear example is Sites Reservoir which was specifically designed to capture rainfall from extreme events. If it was in place now, 2022 would not look so bleak.

    “In addition to lack of storage, our water policy has also failed to adapt and remains mired in outdated science and cumbersome bureaucracy.

    “We are not asking people to choose between a domestic food supply and a clean environment. We need both and that is achievable if we make the necessary adjustments.

    “Immediate action is necessary because by the time the grocery shelves are empty it will be too late.”

    #  #  #

    For further information, contact: 

    Mike Wade, California Farm Water Coalition 
    (916) 718-7408
    mwade@farmwater.org

    Source: California Farm Water Coalition

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