Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

Brexit's legacy UK
Equivalence is not the same
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The familiar CE quality mark is far more important than it might appear at first sight. It is the first line of defence in meeting product liability requirements. The presence of the CE graphic assures consumers that the product concerned meets all the EU safety regulations and can be sold legally within the EU. CE stands for conformite europenne (conforms to European regulations).

At some point in the Brexit planning stages, someone had the bright idea of devising a British equivalent to reassure consumers that post-Brexit British goods complied with British legal requirements. It would have been better if someone had spotted the looming problem and canned the UKCA lookalike quality mark before releasing it on an unsuspecting public. No such luck, it just gets worse.

The UK parliament’s control of the quality mark and its use is limited to, well, the UK. It has no status or relevance in continental Europe, for which it was intended. Brussels does not recognise the mark, nor is there any reason why it should. UK plans to drop accreditation for the original CE mark have suddenly been put on hold, as businesses complained that they genuinely need the CE mark for their export goods. As part of the CE accreditation, a substantial chunk of EU law, previously earmarked for dumping, will now have to be kept on the statute book for the UK’s claim to continue issuing CE marks to be valid.

It is the kind of own-goal for which Brexit is becoming infamous. There is the mild embarrassment of having to retain EU laws that some in government wanted to clear out so as to make room for other things. The requirement to organise and fund two separate product certification applications, not to mention the additional testing fees, has unsettled many businesses, faced with having to pay twice. More to the point, UKCA cannot replace the CE mark outside UK borders, nor will Brussels ever recognise it.

Follow this link for a guide to UKCA and CE requirements.

France olives Switzerland tomatoes
Burning question
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Wildfires across huge areas of southern Europe mean even more bad news for olive oil and table olive packers. It is impossible to predict the full effect on this winter’s prices for olive oil or table olives, but there will be direct consequences. This is not a complete wipe-put story, since established olive trees with deep root systems can recover from fires, although this will take time. Young olive trees are more susceptible to fire damage.

Click image for latest information

The immediate impact will be on packers and blenders of olive oil, particularly in Italy: these skilled folk have a network of suppliers for very specific oils with relatively rare qualities. The suppliers of such rarities are spread over the continent, from Gibraltar and north Africa down to the middle east. The trading network is complex and known to a handful of olive oil blending experts.

In a year when the mainstream crop is already looking patchy and fraught, this will mean higher costs for the retailers. In the UK, the multiples are reluctant to let their double digit margins take a hit and will do their level best to make sure that suppliers carry the burden. The situation is, however, beyond horse trading. Bulk olive oil prices will be non-negotiable, where there is product to be had. Looking at the Mediterranean over the next few weeks, the following impacts can be expected. Industrial tomatoes for peeled plum tomato canning lines can be expected to be short, since crop irrigation is being used for firefighting. Chopped tomatoes, passata and tomato paste can be made from almost any variety of tomato and production is not limited to southern Italy. Table olives are under a shadow, with a high risk of localised damage: a lot of olives will have been burnt off the trees. Durum wheat, essential for pasta manufacture, may have escaped the worst of the heat waves, but export tonnages will probably be restricted.

For the latest information on the European forest fires, click here.

canning food manufacture France
Footnote on the protagonists in Time Travel for Food
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Leadership is something we all respond to and it takes many forms.

Take a figure from history, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. A product of the ruling elite of his day, Napoleon underwent officer training and was undaunted by meeting calls to define the working structure of a post revolutionary state from scratch. The Codes Civils (sometimes referred to as the Napoleonic Codes) were an object lesson in structuring the edifice of a state at the start of a post-royal era (https://urbanfoodchains.uk/forging-urban-food-chains/). Bonaparte had the outward signs of a civic visionary and expected to lead from the front.

Employing a completely different set of skills, Nicolas Appert perfected the system of sealing food into bottles or cans and cooking it so thoroughly that the product would keep indefinitely. Sometimes referred to eponymously as Appertisation, the process has been used with very few changes, for more than two hundred years. Appert predated fellow Frenchman Louis Pasteur by just over 60 years and would not have predicted the link between heat treatment and killing pathogens that Pasteur would make in years to come.(https://urbanfoodchains.uk/time-travel-for-food-2/)

There are grounds to suppose that the Appertisation process was known to food producers, but not widely practiced in the 1790s. In place of a theoretical explanation for the incontrovertable success of the process, Appert constantly ran tests on batches of food, using bottles and stoppers of all sorts of material: ceramic, glass and metal. As the years progressed, his confidence in the process grew, as he learnt what cooking times different foods needed in a water jacket of boiling water. Nicolas Appert had been raised by an inn keeper working in Chalons-sur-Saone and was a competent chef. His entire working life was focussed on feeding people and by the 1790s Appert was working as a confiseur in a Paris suburb.

A confiseur is someone who cooks off food, usually with boiling water, to make range of “confits” or foods almost cooked to a mush. Confiserie refers to boiled sugar confectionery, while confits are table-ready dishes which can be sweet or savoury and typically capped off with a layer of fat. The aim is to cook off seasonal gluts, although meat-based confits had short shelf lives, since the melted grease did not offer any real protection to the dish. This was the reason for Appert’s interest in sealing his wide-necked bottles, in a bid to extend shelf life. Appert successfully got reliable results, which is why Appertisation is referred to as “Time Travel For Food” on this website.

Appert plied his trade as a confiseur and wholesale grocery from a workshop in rue des Lombards. He was a member of the militant Section des Lombards, who mobilised at moments of crisis during the revolution in Paris. An active Jacobin, Nicolas and his wife Elisabeth supported the revolutionary cause in practical ways, such as holding planning meetings in the workshop.

As readers will learn in the short history of Nicolas Appert, the confiseur was pulled into the Jacobin Terreur, saved only by the fact that Robespierre was executed 36 hours before Appert was due to go to the scaffold. The Appert household survive the latter years of the revolution: Nicolas is awarded an “encouragement” of 12,000 gold coins by Napoleon. This comes with a requirement to publish a manual to Appertisation at his own expense. Appert remained politically active during his life and was elected mayor of Ivry-sur-Seine.

Appert also makes a trip to England in 1814, at the height of the Napoleonic wars. The reason for the trip was for after-sales support for an English engineer who had licenced the process for commercial exploitation. The technology transfer had been overseen by Pierre Durand, a Bordeaux wine merchant turned intellectual property agent. Durand’s leadership style was simply blunt and overbearing. He met his match, however, in Bryan Donkin, his English client.

A highly regarded engineer, Donkin had undertaken  work for the Fourdrinier brothers, Henri and Seely, to make their purchase of a design for a papermaking machine work in a paper mill environment. As his French clients faced bankruptcy and Donkin still had a workshop to keep in production, there was a pause in proceedings during which Donkin tried to stake a claim on what is known today as the Fourdrinier papermaking machine. Resourceful as ever, Donkin contrived to settle the name of the machine on the brothers, but retained control over the crucial detail that allowed him to  sell working papermaking machines in his own name. Since he installed almost 200 machines across Europe, one can suppose that he was commercially successful. It should be added that Donkin also patented the dip pen and a number of nib designs, which generated far greater sales than could be earned from selling a papermaking machine. This management style is close to opportunistic, but shows a high level of resourceful thinking. Bryan Donkin’s grandson, called Bryan after his grandfather, developed and patented the Donkin gas valve, which is more widely known than Donkin senior’s achievements.

retail UK UK economy
Grocery Code Adjudicator: inaction in action
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Not long ago the Grocery Code Adjudicator’s office published its report for the past year. The reality behind the lukewarm prose is more disturbing than might first appear: the complaints raised are predictably familiar and there are multiple labels for what appear to be depressingly perennial abuses. More to the point, given the confidentiality of the process, it is not possible to determine an order of magnitude for the sums involved. This is not just a nice-to-have ballpark figure, but a true measure of the scale of a continuing problem.

Click image to download jargon buster

The presentation and figures can be downloaded here. There are a good two dozen descriptions for the issues that have been raised by suppliers. The rates of change given for year-on-year complaint numbers are within five or six percent of the previous year, which is supposed to mean that everything is under control. The message is a very firm “…nothing to be seen here. No, really, THERE IS NOTHING to be seen here…” Yet the sort of practices that suppliers are complaining about would normally merit criminal investigations. Or would insisting on the letter of the law just put suppliers out of business?

Those who have been in the food industry for years will have acquired a collection of tales of extortion and graft that at first hearing seem overstated, but which become hard to ignore or dismiss. A lifelong food industry veteran put it this way: “The multiples have been running circles round the government for years. It’s been going on for decades. These days retailers are so used to demanding money left right and centre that it’s hard to know how they keep track of their real costs.”

It is well nigh impossible to assign an order of magnitude or give a steer on how serious the ongoing abuse might be in the grocery trade. Let us be as circumspect as possible in unpacking this one. Let us assume, for instance, that there is only one instance of a dispute under any of these headings and that the percentage figure, rather than referring to a case load, is a crude measure of the sums of money involved. Anything bolder than that would suggest a totally compromised food industry. Don’t rule that out, by the way.

Now take the following two GCA sub-headings as examples:

(a) Requests for payments to keep your existing business with a Retailer (pay to stay)

(b) Requests for lump sum payments relating to Retailer margin shortfall not agreed at the start of the contract period.

These both look suspiciously like blackmail, but let’s try to estimate an order of magnitude for these actions. Shelf money demands are usually based on a fixed sum per SKU per product range, for a listing across two to three hundred sales outlets. To get an idea of the sums of money that can be involved, assume the product concerned costs one pound and comes in five flavours and three pack sizes (sub-total 15 SKUs). Pull a pay to stay value out of thin air of GBP 5000 for each SKU listing across 250 sales outlets, fifteen SKUs times GBP 5000, guesstimate budget GBP 75000. If the retailer has a markup of 20p, the pay to stay demand is equivalent to a supplier “giving” 375,000 units of product (20p times 375,000 = GBP 75,000). While it is not unheard of for retailers to withhold all or part of an invoice, it is not in the suppliers’ interest to hand over lorryloads of product, which will earn the retailer the full retail price at the checkout: literally having their cake and eating it.

Given that a hypermarket can easily have up to 20,000 food SKUs, not counting own-label lines, you could end up with an aggregate demand for shelf money running to millions of pounds if they were all to be counted towards a shelf money Christmas list. Given that these are very large wadges of money to conceal on a balance sheet, our imaginary retailer will probably need all the accounting strategies they can think of to hide the true state of the cash flows. Again, to avoid overstatement, we will assume that each heading only refers to a single instance of a commercial abuse.

In choosing a theoretical sum of GBP 5000 per SKU for shelf money, this could be seen as an exaggeration. However, one simple factor ramping up shelf money demands is the simple proliferation of the high street formats for mainstream food retailers. It is highly improbable that a retail multiple would forego an established shelf money framework when opening high street stores. However, competing convenience stores simply do not have the kind of clout that a major multiple can bring to bear on brand owners in a store format that leans heavily on established brands.

The office of Grocery Code Adjudicator was set up about 20 years ago and spent about half that time building up its role as a trusted arbiter, a lap dog rather than a watchdog. It is hard to imagine that it has done more than scratch the surface of the very real problems facing food manufacturers and brand owners in their dealings with a clique of very powerful customers, the multiple retailers.

France livestock
Forging urban food chains
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France in the closing years of the 18th century was in total chaos. The Terreur (terror) reached its height with the execution of the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre in the summer of 1794. In the years that followed, the Consulate took control led by Napoleon Bonaparte. The young Napoleon set himself the task of clearing away all the old laws and the rag-bag collections of local regulations (“coutumes”).  He replaced them with the “Code Civile” that set out the rules for a constitutional reset.

The code was secular and written in ordinary French. It detailed what was expected of citizens — considering men to be equal before the law, while assigning women the role of dowry-bearers, facilitating the transfer of property and assets between families. Because of the contractual importance of marriage, there were elaborate requirements to ensure that men were legitimate before they could be married. The husband owned his wife’s dowry, but not her paraphenalia.

The code also laid out commercial frameworks and set standards for product liability. For instance, artisans and craftsmen were required to give a ten-year guarantee on their work. When selling land, sellers were obliged to include the oxen teams and equipment needed to work the land. And those acquiring livestock with a farm were required to keep the animals exclusively on that farm, keeping the dung on the holding. It is worth remembering that rural France was heavily  populated in those days, but over the coming century, this was about to change. The Code applied to both town and country, as well as to those on their travels. For example, innkeepers had a legally enforceable duty of care for their guests’ goods and chattels, which extended to those working on the premises, protecting them, too, from light-fingered interlopers.

The March 1804 version of the Code Civile had more than 1800 paragraphs and was the largest version to be put up for adoption. There were prolonged debates about all three circulated versions, each with different numbering and paragraph counts. Some of the articles in the Code Civile still apply to this day, often heavily modified. The administrative commitment to a document-based system put a greater priority on literacy. Deaf or visually challenged citizens who could read had protected access to the provisions of the code unlike non-readers who made their mark to sign off  documents they could not read.

Brexit's legacy UK economy
Pounds, pence and Euros
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If current headlines (week 24, 2023) about the turmoil in the Conservative party appear serious, wait until the parlous state of the UK’s unfinished Brexit arrangements come home to roost. History will judge those responsible, but the UK population will pay the price. Having copied and pasted the Common European Tariff into the UK economy, ministerial hands have been fiddling with some of the detail, but not with any visible signs of understanding what they were about.

As one might expect, the Common European Tariff is haunted by a number of ghosts in the machine. These are mainly mechanisms that protected former cornerstones of the Common Agricultural Policy from third country imports. With some dating back to the 1970s, these tariffs were supposed to make subsidised EU agricultural products competitive on the internal market against third country goods. Many of the tariffs are ad valorem percentages, but most of the politically sensitive sectors supported by the CAP are made up of an ad valorem percentage and a flat rate payment per 100kg in Euros, redenominated in GBP.

Third country olive oil arriving in the EU still faces a flat rate duty of EUR 124.50 per 100 kg. For some years now, there have been trade deals with third countries such as Tunisia, which establish a duty-free quota for EU packers. This olive oil can then be traded freely within the EU.

Under Rules Of Origin (ROO), however, any third country olive oil arriving in the UK is liable for duty at GBP 104 pro rata in blends, converted into sterling at around 85p to the Euro. Now the UK has no indigenous producers of olive oil to protect from competitive pricing of third country oils and ministers could have cheerfully set the duty to zero.

All the schedule XIX money values appeared in Euros before Brexit, as they did when the document first appeared in the summer of 2018. For its UK enquiries, HMRC works in pounds and pence. The transfer of Schedule XIX to Sterling was carried out by the WTO (World Trade Organisation) but there remain a lot of unresolved issues that will take a lot longer to resolve than Brexit. With more than 160 members, the WTO’s insistence on consensus makes bluster and confrontation counter productive. Brexit negotiations were shot through with contempt for consensus on the British side. In Geneva it doesn’t wash.

canning fish France sardine
Packing them in
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An unmistakeable sign of the impending holiday season turned up this morning in the form of an email from Thierry Jourdan, boss of the family-run cannery La Quiberonnaise in Britanny. Founded in 1921 by Thierry’s grandfather, the fish canning business packs sardines and mackerel landed by local inshore boats as well as taking in yellowfin tuna to pack a range of cans in domestic sizes.

Such canneries were a common sight in seaside towns during the first half of the twentieth century. Today, there are still a number of survivors in what used to be a crowded market. As the fleets dispersed and catches waned, the importance of the tourist trade was recognised by canneries along the French coast. The 1930s saw the establishment of paid summer holidays for French workers: it was the salvation of resourceful canners.

They greeted holidaymakers with open arms and tasteful souvenirs. Local artists are still engaged to create designs for annual editions of elaborately decorated cans of fish, with the promise of a fresh series the next year. Themes range from gently humorous picture postcard subjects to classical offerings that are as likely to end up in an art gallery as a kitchen. Canned fish as an art form has some unexpectedly well-known devotees. Food critic Jean-Luc Petitrenaud always takes a decorated can of sardines for his host whenever he is invited to dinner.

Brexit's legacy customs clearance Europe
Unfinished business
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Years after leaving the European Union, the United Kingdom is finally preparing to standardise sanitary and phytosanitary border controls for imports of animal products and plant material at the UK border. This long-running shortfall in customs procedures has been a recurring bone of contention.

Those of us with long memories will recall Boris Johnson assuring EU leaders that he had a workable solution for the Irish border. This ground-breaking declaration rapidly degenerated into despair and disillusion as it became increasingly clear that Boris had no intention of delivering any such thing.

Just in case this sounds overstated, listen to Boris Johnson’s biographer Anthony Seldon talking to Sky News about Johnson’s real Brexit agenda. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1009898093714184

This failure has been the elephant in the room haunting European relations ever since. When the UK first announced its intention of becoming a third country, France moved swiftly and decisively to implement a range of Border Inspection Post (BIP) facilities at Calais to complement those available at Dunquerque and Boulogne sur Mer. The substantial investment and recruitment drive was a prerequisite for handling third country imports of animal products and plant material from the world’s newest third country, the UK. The French government was in a position to act in a timely manner, since the state owns all the country’s port facilities, the daily management of which is delegated to local chambers of commerce.

The English situation, on the other hand, is an arbitrary mix of publicly and privately owned ports, in which the larger ones are public assets while many smaller ports are privately-owned and/or run by trusts. These routinely require government legislation to authorise investment capital, often secured against the assets and fabric of the ports concerned. This less-than-satisfactory muddle means that the government could not require some ports to release land for goods inspection facilities without first checking the local management structure(s). The UK government intends to expand its existing provision of inspection facilities along the lines of EU system, seemingly more cheaply than what the EU would charge for inspecting goods travelling in the opposite direction.

The EU has round 400 Border Inspection Posts (BIPs), later renamed Border Control Posts (BCPs). These are equipped and authorised to inspect consignments of specific livestock species and/or products derived from them. Importers need to book an appointment and plan their journey accordingly. Likewise, shipments of fish and plant material will be directed to BCPs that are equipped to inspect them. EU checks on paperwork are capped at around 45 Euros per consignment. Randomised physical inspections cost around 450 Euros for a container and are charged to the owner of the goods concerned. Regardless of any duty payable on the goods, VAT is payable on the inspection fee, as a component of import VAT. The UK government is quite clear in presenting its plans for border checks that it will retain the principle of charging for inspecting paperwork, but charge a single one-size-fits-all fee for all traffic, regardless of whether or not goods are physically checked. (link)

“It is the UK Government’s intention that there will be charging at Inland Sites to recover operating costs which are necessary to undertake physical inspections at BCPs. The UK Government will consult on its proposed methodology and rates in the coming weeks to inform charging levels. The proposal is to administer a Common User Charge on each consignment which enters through Port of Dover and Eurotunnel that is eligible for SPS checks. The charge would apply to all eligible consignments, whether or not they are selected for a BCP inspection. The indicative Common User Charge rate is estimated to be in the region of £20-£43, however final rates will be determined following consultation.”

The document does not specify a price range for physical inspections and it is not clear whether there are enough qualified vets to cover such a requirement. This light touch, combined with the government’s enthusiasm for trusted trader schemes suggests that physical inspections will be the exception rather than the rule.

The extra cost of shipping animal products into Europe as a third country has hit UK exporters, who were not warned in advance. There’s a footnote about import VAT here, by the way.

food manufacture food production raw UK
Investigating hydrogen
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For the past eighty years scientists have been rolling up their sleeves at the Glensaugh research farm and finding robust answers to the problems facing the agricultural sector. Perched on the east coast of Scotland not far from Aberdeen, the site is set to become a carbon neutral farming environment once its building programme comes on stream, pencilled in for 2025.

BBC journalist Nancy Nicolson visited Glensaugh for an edition of On Your Farm, which aired on April 30 and is still available on BBC Sounds. Water is the key to the project, using an industrial scale electrolyser to generate hydrogen that will power tractors and heavy machinery. This will in turn be powered by an array of green energy sources, such as turbines and solar panels.

A headline figure for the project is four million pounds: this is explained in part by the additional cost of being early adopters of technology that is still in development. This project will cast a light on the current operational energy needs of a one thousand hectare estate. Investment on this scale in one agricultural location is based on the assumption that the rest of the national economy will still be functioning in the future, in a recognisable form. We are still a long way from converting urban centres into sustainable economic entities.

Listen to Nancy Nicolson here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001lhz1?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

UK economy
Real economic power
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The economy often appears to be a large, ramshackle institution, a law unto itself. This is partly due to the skills of those who really control it and partly because it is both a large ramshackle institution and a law unto itself. If the economy was only made up of money, it might be easier to make a case for saying that it can be controlled, if not managed, at some level. The truth is that the economy comprises much more than mere money and is constantly manipulated by economic factors that strengthen the relative strengths of one component over another.

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