Tag: Product of USA

Buy American Act, Certifications, COOL Country of origin labeling, CPG, Executive Order 13788, FTC, Made in America, Made in USA, Military, NAFTA/CAFTA, Political, Power of Consumers, Promotional Products, USMCA, VERITY

MADE in USA Fraud in the Promotional Products Industry

June 07, 2019 Cheyenne WY, Washington DC USA

Verity | TRUTH MATTERS™

MADE in USA Fraud Claims on the Rise.

If you are in the Promotional Products Industry and are claiming to be Made in USA we can help with Validation and Certification, we have been in the Made in USA Business Since 2003. PPAI, ASI, SAGE, Distributor Central

CHINESE Tariffs, USMCA | NAFTA, Buy American Act, and the Executive Order (EO):13788 all Make the Made in USA Claim that much more Valuable all claims must to be validated and checked and VERITY has the solution. 

FRAUD, COUNTERFEIT, PROVENANCE and FOOD SAFETY
are the problems we solve.

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The Honey Launderers: Uncovering the Largest Food Fraud in U.S. History

BusinessWeek

By Susan Berfield | BusinessWeek – Mon, Sep 23, 2013 1:14 PM EDT

Honey

Magnus von Buddenbrock and Stefanie Giesselbach arrived in Chicago in 2006 full of hope. He was 30, she was 28, and they had both won their first overseas assignments at ALW Food Group, a family-owned food-trading company based in Hamburg. Von Buddenbrock had joined ALW—the initials stand for its founder, Alfred L. Wolff—four years earlier after earning a degree in marketing and international business, and he was expert in the buying and selling of gum arabic, a key ingredient in candy and soft drinks. Giesselbach had started at ALW as a 19-year-old apprentice. She worked hard, learned quickly, spoke five languages, and within three years had become the company’s first female product manager. Her specialty was honey. When the two colleagues began their new jobs in a small fourth-floor office a few blocks from Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, ALW’s business was growing, and all they saw was opportunity.

On March 24, 2008, von Buddenbrock came to the office around 8:30 a.m., as usual. He was expecting a quiet day: It was a holiday in Germany, and his bosses there had the day off. Giesselbach was on holiday, too; she had returned to Germany to visit her family and boyfriend. Sometime around 10 a.m., von Buddenbrock heard a commotion in the reception area and went to have a look. A half-dozen armed federal agents, all wearing bulletproof vests, had stormed in. “They made a good show, coming in with full force,” he recalls. “It was pretty scary.”

The agents asked if anybody was hiding anywhere, then separated von Buddenbrock and his assistant, the only two employees there. Agents brought von Buddenbrock into a conference room, where they questioned him about ALW’s honey business. After a couple of hours they left, taking with them stacks of paper files, copies of computer hard drives, and samples of honey.

Giesselbach returned from Germany three days later. Her flight was about to land at O’Hare when the crew announced that everyone would have to show their passports at the gate. As Giesselbach walked off the plane, federal agents pulled her aside. She, too, answered their questions about ALW’s honey shipments. After an hour, they let her leave. The agents, from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security, had begun to uncover a plot by ALW to import millions of pounds of cheap honey from China by disguising its origins.

Americans consume more honey than anyone else in the world, nearly 400 million pounds every year. About half of that is used by food companies in cereals, bread, cookies, and all sorts of other processed food. Some 60 percent of the honey is imported from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and other trading partners. Almost none comes from China. After U.S. beekeepers accused Chinese companies of selling their honey at artificially low prices, the government imposed import duties in 2001 that as much as tripled the price of Chinese honey. Since then, little enters from China legally.

Von Buddenbrock and Giesselbach continued to cooperate with the investigators, according to court documents. In September 2010, though, the junior executives were formally accused of helping ALW perpetuate a sprawling $80 million food fraud, the largest in U.S. history. Andrew Boutros, assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago, had put together the case: Eight other ALW executives, including Alexander Wolff, the chief executive officer, and a Chinese honey broker, were indicted on charges alleging a global conspiracy to illegally import Chinese honey going back to 2002. Most of the accused executives live in Germany and, for now, remain beyond the reach of the U.S. justice system. They are on Interpol’s list of wanted people. U.S. lawyers for ALW declined to comment.

In the spring of 2006, as Giesselbach, who declined requests for an interview, was preparing for her job in Chicago, she started receiving e-mail updates about various shipments of honey moving through ports around the world. According to court documents, one on May 3 was titled “Loesungmoeglichkeiten,” or “Solution possibilities.” During a rare inspection, U.S. customs agents had become suspicious about six shipping containers of honey headed for ALW’s customers. The honey came from China but had been labeled Korean White Honey.

Business, Chemicals, China, COOL Country of origin labeling, Economy, Espionage, Family, Farming, Food, Outsourcing, Product, Product of USA, Supply Chain, Tainted Products, USA-C, USDA

From China, The Future of Fish

Meet the Chinese tilapia, a bland food product that grows fast and sells cheap. Environmentalists hate it, but Americans keep ordering more.

By Bruce Einhorn

(Fixes reference to U.S. food-service market in the 27th paragraph.)

At the end of a wooden pier, a squat red machine the size of a dishwasher hums along with the din of nearby cicadas. The fish-feeder is tossing grain pellets into one of Chen Haiping’s nine fish ponds, each as long as a football field, in the town of Shuixi, in China’s Guangdong province. It’s breakfast time, and thousands of tilapia are thrashing their tails and sticking their mouths into the air to get some of the soy-and-corn mixture. Chen, a 32-year-old former duck farmer with a wispy mustache, has been running this farm for eight years.

Before the tilapia, these ponds were filled with shrimp, which the Chinese like. They aren’t big fans of tilapia, a foreign fish; the name in Chinese,luofeiyu, refers to tilapia’s origins in Africa. It doesn’t have much flavor, and it doesn’t grow big enough to put in the middle of the table at a family meal. Americans, however, can’t get enough of Chinese-raised tilapia, so tilapia it is. The fish, Chen notes, are hardier and don’t require as much work. “Shrimp can die much more easily,” says Chen, who wears a wide-brimmed straw hat to protect himself from the 95-degree heat.

Despite environmental warnings about Chinese-raised tilapia from watchdog groups such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, which publishes an influential best choices/avoid list of seafood and rates Chinese-raised tilapia as “avoid,” U.S. consumption keeps rising. In 2009 the U.S. imported 404 million pounds of tilapia, up from 298 million in 2005. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) imports nearly 200 shipping containers, or 8.8 million pounds, every month, although they will not say how much comes from China. (The company declined to comment.) Domestic fish farmers can’t come close to meeting demand. Although there are tilapia farms in the U.S., the fish does better in tropical climates, so most of it comes from Asia or Latin America.

Continue reading “From China, The Future of Fish” →

Business, Certifications, Chemicals, China, Education, Family, Farming, Power of Consumers, Product of USA, Retail, Tainted Products

The dangers of farm-raised tilapia from China
Talipia
BY DR. MICHAEL L. SMITH
COMMENTARY Appeared originally on Studio V Health WordPress

As a proponent of healthy eating and educating the public on sound evidence based research, I find it very alarming that there is a significant trend in this country whereby many people accept as fact, “the foods that we import that are so abundant in our supermarkets must be okay to eat, otherwise the government wouldn’t allow it”. Sound strange?

Well, I heard one of my patients say this to me just the other day when we were having a discussion about the pros and cons of eating fish as a regular source of protein in our diets. Let me introduce to you, what has become extremely popular on the average Americans dinner table over the past few years and that is tilapia. You’ve seen it, perhaps have eaten it at home or even in your local restaurant. In fact, it’s become so popular that Kevin Fitzsimmons, a professor at the University of Arizona and board member of HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries, that sells Chinese farm-raised tilapia was recently quoted, “Tilapia is going to be basically where chicken is with poultry”.

The U.S. currently imports about 80 percent of the frozen tilapia from China. So what’s the problem with this scenario?

Consumers need to be made more aware of the problems with eating tilapia that is imported from this world’s largest producer of the farm raised variety. Numerous environmental warnings about Chinese-raised tilapia from such groups as the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch have put this fish on their “avoid’ list of seafoods, this despite the fact that the U.S. has increased it’s imports every year from 2005 on. Many of the farm raised tilapia are grown in the notoriously polluted areas of China’s Guangdong province.

Recently, the U.S. Agriculture Dept.’s Economic Research Service raised questions about Chinese safety standards for farm-raised fish. The report mentioned, “Fish are often raised in ponds where they feed on waste runoff from poultry and livestock”. It has also been noted that Chinese farmers save money on the cost of raising these fish by dumping animal wastes into the ponds which cause algae to grow and serve as their food source. And don’t forget all of the problems with many other products made in China- toys with lead and toothpastes found to contain diethylene glycol, a poisonous chemical. Even more alarming is the usage of carbon monoxide which preserves the color of the fish and can make the fish appear fresher than it is! If you read the label of many brands, the only two ingredients listed are “Tilapia” and Carbon Monoxide (To Retain Natural Color)”.

From a nutritional standpoint, tilapia fails miserably when stacked against salmon, tuna, mackerel, sardines and other marine sources of the omega-3 oils which have been shown to have positive effects on cardiovascular disease, blood pressure, stroke, inflammation, and brain health. Tilapia’s flesh doesn’t contain any. And the reason? If the producers used sources of omega-3 enriched meal to feed the tilapia to make them more of a viable healthy food source, the price would increase and that unfortunately is one of the reasons why this fish has become an American dietary staple. So it always comes down to the idea of how much of a price do you pay for eating unhealthy foods to save some money in the long run.

In my office we have a saying, “If you don’t take time for your HEALTH, then you will have to take time for your illness”. Educate yourself by becoming a label reader and asking the question: “Is this really good to put in my body?” and if you can’t pronounce an ingredient and the number of ingredients are many, it’s probably best to avoid.

Strive to be healthier!

Dr. Michael L. Smith specializes in functional medicine, nutrition and chiropractic healthcare

To learn more about why it is important to look for Made in USA Certification and Product of USA Certification on food or drinks we consume visit our website at:  www.USA-C.com

Made in USA Certified

COOL Country of origin labeling, CPG, Farming, Food, Government, Made in America, Made in USA

Do you want to know what country your food comes from?

We think you do and an overwhelming 92% of American’s say -YES in a recent Boston Consulting Group survey of consumers.

Sadly, the WTO (World Trade Organization) doesn’t see it that way.  The WTO has ruled that U.S. producers of beef, poultry, lamb and other agriculture products must remove the current legislated Country of Origin Labeling from their packages by May 23rd. (less then 2 short months away)
So, now consumers will lose the transparency in their food supply that for years they have fought for.  Scary, but true.
What is even scarier is that mainstream media hasn’t picked up on this story in a major way so, many consumers don’t even know what is about to happen in May to the packaging of the goods they buy everyday for themselves and their families.
So, what can you do about it.

1st Let your Grocer, Retailer and Producer know this is important and you want to know where your food comes from
2nd tell them we have an independent solution for you to know and you want to see the label “Product of USA Certified”.

Our company is the  leader in independent, 3rd party certification of the Product of USA Certified claim.  We are a voluntary certification that producers can use on their product and packaging to let consumers know –that they are proudly – PRODUCT OF USA CERTIFIED.

U.S. consumers have the right to now where their food comes from and producers have the right to voluntary market their products with our trademarked certification.

We are the solution that consumers and producers are looking for.

Contact us today for more information.

Product of USA Certified

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Brazil, COOL Country of origin labeling, Farming, Food

ITC Votes to Revoke OJ Anti-Dumping Order


FLORIDA CITRUS MUTUAL
P.O. Box89 • Lakeland,FL 33802
ph:(863) 682-1111   www.flcitrusmutual.com


LAKELAND, Fla. (March 14, 2012) – The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) Wednesday struck a blow toFlorida citrus growers by voting to revoke the anti-dumping order on certain Brazilian orange juice processors.

The ITC said removing the anti-dumping order would not materially harm the Florida citrus grower despite increased Brazilian production, declining U.S. consumption and rapidly escalating costs of production.

An anti-dumping order covering three major Brazilian orange juice processors – Cutrale Citrus Juice, Citrosuco Paulista and Louis Dreyfus – has been in place since 2006. Every five years, the United States conducts a “sunset review” to determine whether duties should remain in place on Brazilian OJ or be revoked, taking into consideration how that would impact the U.S. industry, including Florida growers.

The decision came after Florida Citrus Mutual (FCM) spent the past six months building a case against the Brazilians.

“Florida Citrus Mutual is extremely disappojnted with this decision and we will review next steps including an appeal,” said Michael W. Sparks, FCM’s executive VP/CEO. “Over the past five years Brazilian processors have continued to dump cheap product into the United States as their residual market and I cannot see any reason why they would stop, especially if the anti-dumping order goes away.”

Dumping is bad because it can drive domestic producers out of business while destabilizing world markets.U.S.firms can file an anti-dumping petition with the International Trade Commission, which investigate the matter.

If a domestic industry can prove foreign producers are selling product for less than “normal value,” including below the cost of production, then anti-dumping deposits can be imposed by the government.

Continue reading “ITC Votes to Revoke OJ Anti-Dumping Order” →

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This Column Was 100% Made in America
A Hyundai ad that ran during Super Bowl coverage showed workers from the company's plant in Montgomery, Ala.
A Hyundai ad that ran during Super Bowl coverage showed workers from the company's plant in Montgomery, Ala.
By   Published: February 15, 2012

BLUE-COLLAR workers in fields like manufacturing — particularly when they make products on American soil — are again becoming a favorite subject for white-collar workers on Madison Avenue.

The trend was born of the economic worries that followed the financial crisis in 2008. Recently, it is gaining steam — appropriate, since the ads often use blasts of steam to signal something is being built — with proposals in Washington to offer incentives to encourage the location or relocation of factories in the United States.

“We continue to see very heavy emotional response to anything that would leverage against the bad economy,” said Robert Passikoff, president at Brand Keys, a brand and customer-loyalty consulting company in New York. Continue reading “This Column Was 100% Made in America” →