At 09:07 AM 10/8/98 -0500, you wrote:
 
>(I also called our local food store and reported their honey display
>needed cleaned up.  Old dusty jars, sticky and poorly shelved.  I would guess
>the worst display in the store.
 
Hi Dale,
 
You did the right thing because any problem like this starts at the
retailer level even though many honey  wholesalers have people in the field
that do work at the retail level they can not be in every story every day.
I would caution you that if the retailer is doing a sloppy job with the
Honey displays you should be very careful of anything you buy out of the
meat or dairy display because of the real health hazards.
 
>Too bad honey is not marketed like Cambels soups.)
 
This is an interesting comment because some HONEY is marketed just like
"Cambels" soups and maybe even by the same brokers in some areas. Honey at
retail at the national and to some extent the regional level the US for the
most part is not a case of direct sale by the honey producer or even the
honey packer directly to the retailer. Food brokers are used as sale agents
and they are responsible for the in store service to the retailer. In some
areas the packer may have people who also do this, or both.
 
I won't go into great detail on how it all works for honey but I want to
say that if you think that corruption in selling in Mexico is bad, or
marketing in Japan is bad then you know what it is like in the food or
honey business in the US. It sucks, its corrupt, and it works.
 
Not so many years ago Sue Bee built a new plant, not the last one, but the
one before that, and I had a chance to visit with one of my good friends.
We left the guided tour and did a real in depth inspection and found some
interesting things going on in the old plant. Thousands of little glass
jars of honey being melted or dumped in the old ovens meant for drums of
honey. This was the returns that Sue's in store service had picked up and
it amounted we later found out to 3/4 and of a million pounds and more over
a period of years. This honey was not fit for human consumption by this
time as most had changed with age and was sold for industrial uses not
intended for food such as shoe shine coloring or something so we were told
so it must have been. I myself have shipped similar honey to be used
tobacco for cigar flavoring to Cuba when it was legal. I don't know if that
what makes those presidential cigars taste so good or if its something else
like a dark deep secret ingredient.
 
Anyway I don't know what Sue Bee does today with the returned honey, but
because of the high cost of handling such food products other national food
company's donate it to local food banks and the light and take a nice tax
write off.
 
ttul, the OLd Drone
Los Banos, Calif.
 
http://beenet.com
 
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