Assignment 1 Go to www.chipotle.com (Links to an external site.)Links to an exte
ID: 95473 • Letter: A
Question
Assignment 1 Go to www.chipotle.com (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..
Click on Food With Integrity and review all pages. Review this as well as pages 1 - 11 and 27 - 24 from the ERS-USDA economic report #830 “Traceability in the U.S. Food Supply: Economic Theory and Industry Studies” ERSTraceabilityReport.pdf
Preview the documentView in a new window to answer the following questions. What does traceability mean to you?
2. What is required to accomplish traceability?
3. Will consumers be willing to pay more for traced food?
4. How can traceability become a value proposition for livestock producers and not just another cost of doing business?
5. What is your impression of the billboard ads on the Chipotle website? Is such an ad campaign healthy or unfair to the livestock industry?
Explanation / Answer
1. Traceability is the ability to verify the history, location, or application of an item bymeans of documented recorded identification.
Traceability systems are a tool to help firms manage the flow of inputs and products to improve efficiency, product differentiation, food safety, and product quality.
2. The besttargeted government policies for strengthening firms’ incentives to invest in traceability are aimed at ensuring that unsafe or falsely advertised foods are quickly removed from the system, while allowing firms the flexibility to determine the manner. Possible policy tools include timed recall standards, increased penalties for distribution of unsafe foods, and increased foodborne-illness surveillance.
3. In order to receive better public good consumers are willing to pay more for tracked food. The government could increase the capability of the entire food supply chain to respond to food safety problems before they grow and affect more consumers.
Numerous proposals involve mandating traceability to help provide consumers with information on a variety of food attributes including country of origin, animal welfare, and genetic engineering, would be welcomed by the consumer either they put some cost in their pockets.
4. Policymakers, producers, and consumers are reassessing the value of systems to track animals and meat from the farm to the consumer. These events, however, are not the first to motivate livestock owners and meat processors and retailers to establish traceability systems for livestock and meat. Ownership disputes, animal health concerns, and meat foodborne illness outbreaks have all motivated the development of systems to identify the ownership and health status of animals and the safety attributes of meat and meat products.
5. In 2015, the website of Chipotle Mexican Grill apparently stated that it had succeeded in transitioning to serving food made only with non-GMO ingredients. It is completely ingenious for Chipotle to claim that “meat and dairy products come from animals that are not genetically modified.” since there are no GM animals used for commercial food production anywhere in the World. With the exception of USDA Organic Certified production, all U.S. livestock is presumed to be fed grain of GM origin.
According to Berman, the opposition directed against intensive livestock agriculture is primarily due to the reality that animal activist groups have taken the initiative and have exploited the social media to promote their views and to disseminate misinformation. This is recognized in the wisdom of President Abraham Lincoln who held that “public opinion is everything”.