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What’s on
FOODStuff SA |
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Editor’s Stuff – Ramaphosa grabs a Big Mac, and PnP launches customer loyalty programme! |
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I used to stress about my lead story for this newsletter, but soon learnt that was a waste of time and rather have adopted the attitude “just be patient and one will appear before Friday”. It’s uncanny how they do, and this Friday I am spoiled for choice!
 Two big stories broked late yesterday, the first that Cyril Ramaphosa and his Shanduka Group have scooped the licensee rights to McDonald’s in SA and promise a major rollout of the fast-food brand over the next few years. Unlike highflying KFC, McDee’s has not been a massive success here and it will be interesting to see how the Ramaphosa hand will play in bettering its fortunes. It’s a move, however, that in the world’s third most-obese nation, is likely to have the health lobby less than thrilled.
How local retailers were going to react to Wal-Mart’s entry into SA was but a matter of time, and the first major response has been the announcement by Pick n Pay of a customer loyalty scheme. It has been developed by the same company that did Tesco’s and which saw its fortunes soar in the UK. This one, in today’s cash-strapped times, has winner embossed all over it. I’m on my way to sign up!
A little boast! I leant this week that FOODStuff SA ranks TWO on both google.com and google.co.za when searching for the term “food industry”. That this small web initiative from a small food country should trump the myriad of international food sites is thrilling. Such a great Google ranking is about as good as it gets in the world of website optimisation.
PS Some readers have been confused by the change of newsletter format – note, all stories are now hyperlinked here directly to their source. FOODStuff SA’s newlook newsletter will be launched shortly.
FOODStuff SA is a hub for food industry recruitment… PCS is looking for a QA manager and an animal feed nutritionist. Click here!
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Feature articles of the week |
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The iziWasha – improving lives, sustainably
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 This product has nothing to do with food, but it’s a stroke of ingenious frugal engineering, designed and developed in SA, that could greatly enhance the lives of billions of women and is thus worthy of exposure to all audiences! Introducing the iziWasha, an innovative low-cost manual clothes washing device for women in emerging markets that has just won a major global competition.
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It isn’t the sin of sloth that makes people fat
 As leading US science writer Gary Taubes explains in his new book, Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It, doctors and medical researchers have got stuck in a flawed paradigm that suggests that both the cause and cure of obesity are clear: ‘We get fat, our physicians tell us, because we eat too much and/or move too little, and so the cure is to do the opposite.’ This is the ‘calories in/calories out’ approach: we get fat because there is an imbalance between the amount of energy entering our body as food and the amount that is used up by our metabolisms and our physical activity.
Taubes says that the trouble with this appealingly simple explanation is that it is wrong. |
Published every Friday on http://www.foodstuffsa.co.za/, this newsletter is a cherry-picking, agglomerating service for all food and beverage industrialists.
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