Don Harrison March 22, 2014 Washington Post MOUNT JACKSON, VA. — Being a small fry can have its advantages. Take the Route 11 brand of sweet potato chips. The snack-food giants — Frito-Lay and such — haven’t taken up the challenge of this more fragile of the tubers, which tends to caramelize and burn during mass production. But for a snack food maker that’s used to taking its time, this is a sweet and profitable niche. Welcome to the world of Route 11 Potato Chips, a small Virginia chippery in the rustic Shenandoah that has been cooking up Kettle-style cult favorites for more than 20 years. Today, the crew at its industrial plant in Mount Jackson is busy churning out 600 pounds an hour of sweet potatoes. They are grown on the Eastern Shore, slow cooked in a mixture of peanut and sunflower oils and lightly seasoned with unrefined salt…

Zoe Wood 12 March 2014 theguardian.com Supermarket chain’s share falls to 28.7%, Kantar Worldpanel data shows, as shoppers defect to discounters such as Aldi Tesco and the other ‘big four’ supermarkets face a polarising grocery market, with discounters stealing sales at the value end while Waitrose cleans up at the top. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA Tesco’s share of the UK grocery market has shrunk to its lowest level in almost a decade as British shoppers defected to German discount chains Aldi and Lidl to save money. The latest data from Kantar Worldpanel shows Tesco’s market share dropped to 28.7% in the 12 weeks to 2 March. That compares with 29.6% a year ago and turns back the clock to late 2004 when the retailer was in the ascendant. At its peak, in October 2007, Tesco’s share hit 31.8%. The “big four” supermarket chains are facing unprecedented pressure as the grocery market…

Marc Gunther 12 March 2014 theguardian.com A California company offers a low-fat, low-salt and low-sugar alternative to Kraft’s Lunchables. Will it push the food giant to improve the nutrition of its boxed lunches too? Back in the 1980s, health-conscious shoppers began to shy away from processed meat because of worries about fat and salt. Executives at Oscar Mayer, facing declining bologna sales, could have sought healthier alternatives. Instead, they invented Lunchables, the packaged, refrigerated, convenient meal in a box. Kids loved them – they found it fun to assemble the crackers, bologna and cheese – and so did harried parents. But food critics were, and still are, appalled by the fat, sugar and salt packed into Lunchables’ familiar yellow packages. Today, Lunchables is a $1bn brand with a persistent image problem – and it’s facing a new competitor aimed at health-conscious parents. The new arrival is Revolution Foods, a small…

MARCH 14, 2014 Would you get a vaccination from your pharmacist? The Australian Medical Association is against the idea. HEALTH Minister Peter Dutton is considering paying chemists to provide more health services such as vaccinations. And he has ruled out allowing Coles and Woolworths to run pharmacies in supermarkets in a win for pharmacy owners fighting to retain their monopoly businesses. The minister is understood to be watching with interest the outcomes of a launch of a pharmacist vaccination trial in Queensland. The payment for extra services could form part of the next $15 billion dollar five-year pharmacy agreement which sets the rates the government pays chemists to dispense prescriptions under the nation’s medicine subsidy scheme. “I am open to discussions about an agreement which pays for tangible services and interventions that will provide better patient outcomes,” Mr Dutton told the Australian Pharmacy Professional Conference on the Gold Coast on…

Shaun Drummond March 14, 2014 The Reserve Bank’s decision to scrap the need for the banking regulator to oversee credit card issuers by the end of 2014 will make it cheaper for a host of competitors to bypass local banks’ card transaction fees by issuing cards directly. The move will also likely see the proliferation of “virtual numbers” here. These are credit numbers without cards that are increasingly being issued to people overseas by companies, including airlines and travel operators. Up to 11 competitors are keen to become direct issuers or acquirers (these are the banks that process credit card transactions for merchants) of credit cards in Australia. New mobile payment providers such as Square are understood to be considering issuing their own credit numbers here. Others include Payvision and Airplus International, a German company owned by Lufthansa that issues single-use MasterCard numbers. Several of these were contacted by The…