2013 is likely to be a very difficult year for agribusiness logistics in Brazil, according to a report from Rabobank. Transport costs in the country have risen significantly due to three factors: new legislation impacting the working hours of truck drivers, a sharp increase in diesel prices and rising export volumes for major commodities.
What if you weren't just delivering meat to stores for sale but doing something more disruptive - like selling 40-pound packages of raw meat out of the back of refrigerated trucks? What kind of bureaucratic fat would you have to cut through then?
Ask any food industry executive to cite his or her greatest concern, and the answer will almost always be the same: product safety. But the list doesn't stop there. Like any other business sector, food manufacturers are grappling with a number of challenges, many of them related to the age of the internet and social media.
As tainted-food scandals go, it wasn't so bad. The discovery early this year of unlabeled horse meat in European food products wasn't for the most part a safety issue. It was a violation of cultural norms, to be sure, as well as a truth-in-packaging problem. Most of all, it was a supply-chain failure.
Tesco PLC's ambitious U.S. experiment - 5-year-old grocery chain Fresh & Easy - has failed after costing its British parent billions of dollars, the company said.