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John Thomson  

Rumours and things

Check the cleaning instructions for your reusable grocery bags.

If the fine print tells you to avoid using bleach and hot water, disregard the advice and get to washing.

If you don't, you could be taking home a lot more than tonight's dinner.

A recent study conducted by environmental-health professors at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University in California found that 97 percent of people toting reusable bags didn't clean them regularly.

What's worse is that more than half the 84 bags studied harbored coliform and heterotrophic bacteria. E. coli was found in 12 percent of them.

Ryan Sinclair, a researcher at Loma Linda and a co-author of the study, said he wasn't surprised by the findings because bacteria can be found in a variety of areas.

"We're so used to disposable bags that we don't think to wash reusable ones," Sinclair said.

"If you leave bags in the trunk ... the temperature increase will help the bacteria grow more efficiently," he said.

Sue Mcallister of Whitehall said she washes her reusable bag once a month or whenever it's obviously dirty.

"This is all I use in here," said Mcallister, who was shopping yesterday at the Clintonville Community Market with her husband, Ed. "We're trying to get away from plastic in our lives."

Sinclair said nearly 99 percent of E. coli strains wouldn’t hurt you. Those that do weren't found in the bags the team studied. However, some bacteria discovered in the bags can make you sick.

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The Fuller family (Earl’s, Joeys Restaurant) has entered the gourmet burger segment with Nimby Burger in Vancouver. A walk-up window concept, Nimby burgers are made from 100% premium chuck and the fries are made from hand-cut Yukon Gold potatoes, which are fried to order and sea-salted.

The scaled-down 5-item menu has quality burgers ($2.99 for a basic, $5.49 for a double burger with cheese), hand-cut fries ($2.49) and real ice-cream shakes ($2.99). “Nimby Burger was inspired by countless road trips down the coast to California with my father, Bus Fuller,” said Jeff Fuller.

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In an e-mail exchange, Loblaw senior director of public relations David Primorac said the amalgamation of Real Canadian Wholesale Club, NG Cash and Carry and Atlantic Cash and Carry are being unified. The company operates 63 stores across the country. The plan calls for all locations to be slowly rebranded as NG Cash and Carry. There are three such stores in the Interior Penticton, Vernon and Salmon Arm.

Loblaw is Canada's largest food retailer with sales of more than $30 billion in 2008.

Wholesale club stores cater to small restaurants, food service operators, convenience store owners and other small businesses but are also open to the public. The stores carry an assortment of grocery, fresh meat, fruit and vegetables, frozen food, bakery, beverages, confectionery and restaurant disposables and supplies and general merchandise.

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Kraft Foods says it produces 30% less waste than it did five years ago, exceeding its goal of a 15% reduction by 2011. The company says it eventually wants to send zero waste to landfills and has achieved that status at nine facilities.
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Here is an example of an interesting company’s name and the story behind it.

IKEA is simply a random collection of letters, based from the first letters of founder Ingvar Kamprad's name in addition to the first letters of the names of the Swedish property and the village in which he grew up: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.

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The owner of Red Lobster is trying to do something no one has ever done on a large commercial scale: lobster farming. It could take years to figure out, as lobsters are difficult to raise in captivity.

But if Darden Restaurants can make its project work, it could revolutionize the way lobsters get to dinner plates. Growing lobsters could make them a cheaper commodity, experts say, much like aquaculture did for shrimp and salmon. But it could also create hardship for lobster fishermen around the world.

Darden's lobster farms are planned overseas, where clawless lobsters are much different from their big-clawed counterparts. A subsidiary called Darden Aquafarm signed an agreement with the government in Brunei.

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Is the Do-Not-Call working? Of course not - did you expect it would? It was started in Canada in the fall of 2008 and since that time there has been 300,000 complaints filed, and just $3,000 in fines collected from four offenders.

We keep receiving calls from the telemarketers in the U.S. all automatically dialed and pre-recorded and all giving away something if you will just hit that first key on your telephone. Every single day we receive unknown calls at the noon hour and at dinnertime, which of course we don’t answer.

Those four operators that were fined have only made partial payments. If you can remember back to when this program began it was supposed to be $1500 per violation was it not? That would mean that if ten people who were on the list were called there would be a fine of $150,000.

There are 8.4 million telephone and fax numbers on the CRTC list in Ottawa with more being added every day.


More John Thomson articles

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About the Author

John Thomson is the Okanagan's pre-eminent business columnist writing his column, Rumours and Things, for over 24 years. Plugged in to the valley's who's who, John keeps his readers coming back for more with his straight talk and optimistic perspective on where we are headed next.

When John is not writing his column, he runs a sixteen year old think tank called the Executive Roundtable and holds his popular "Thomson Presents" quarterly business speaker seminars.

Have a comment, question, or tip for John? 

E-mail John at
[email protected]
or send him a fax at 250-764-8255.

 



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The views expressed are strictly those of the author and not necessarily those of Castanet. Castanet does not warrant the contents.

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