Author: Catherine

n a recent Sunday morning in South Los Angeles, Crop Swap LA volunteers and staffers harvested bags of freshly picked produce from the front yard of a residence. Located just steps from Leimert Park Plaza, the Asante microfarm is the first of what will be numerous microfarms created by the organization, which is dedicated to growing hyperlocal food on unused spaces “in the neighborhood, exclusively for the neighborhood”. “Everything we’re growing is nutrient-dense and the food remains in the neighborhood,” says Jamiah Hargins, who founded Crop Swap LA in 2018 as a small monthly swap of surplus produce. After spending years in finance and consulting, Hargins decided to create a local food distribution system to address the fact that his neighborhood was a food desert, meaning most reside...

On the crowded supermarket shelves, food products clamor for attention, donning packaging and labels designed to clinch the deal. Some 72% of American consumers say that product packaging influences their purchase decisions—a statistic not lost on food manufacturers. This applies to not just the aesthetic design of packaging but what the labels say as well. Louis Biscotti, the National Leader for Food & Beverage Services Group at Marcum, writes in Forbes that when the FDA updated its nutrition facts label for packaged foods in 2020, companies found new opportunities to increase sales. “F&B [food and beverage] companies are finding they can use those labels and other real estate on their packaging to provide nutritional and other data to drive growth. The information on the FDA lab...