For many parents, tiredly pouring the little pouch of mysterious dry ingredients that comes in your Kraft Macaroni & Cheese box into the pasta and watching the whole thing turn a scary orangish color is a rite of passage. There are some, though, who are alarmed (and awake) enough to try and put an end to it

Vani Hari mostly writes her Food Babe blog from North Carolina, but she recently traveled to Northfield, Illinois, to pay a visit to Kraft Foods HQ in Northfield, Illinois, on Monday and demand that the company stop putting yellow #5 and yellow #6 dyes in its food, as Hari noted in a blog post.

Kraft, of course, wasn’t backing down. "The safety and quality of our products is our highest priority and we take consumer concerns very seriously," a Kraft spokeswoman said in a statement, the Chicago Tribune reports. "We carefully follow the laws and regulations in the countries where our products are sold."Continue reading...

Remember all that stuffy marketing from Kraft brands like Oreo, Trident and Tang? Well, once the newly named Mondelēz unit gets its freedom from Kraft in a spinoff of the company's fast-growing, internationally oriented snacks business, expect the marketing chiefs to push the envelope.

The brands to be deposited into Mondelēz — including the aforementioned Oreo, Trident and Tang — "tend to have a younger, vibrant appeal that allow us to push the edge of the marketing much further than some of the classic, traditional, more Midwestern-focused brands," said Mary Beth West, Kraft's chief marketing officer, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. "That's not a value judgment," she insisted.

But West herself does plan to leave "Midwest" parent company Kraft Foods — based in Northfield, Ill. — to join Mondelēz. And she will be taking Dana Anderson, Kraft Foods SVP of marketing strategy and communications to join Kraft Foods CEO Irene Rosenfeld, who is also decamping to Mondelēz.Continue reading...

What's in a name? Kraft Foods is about to find out, after announcing today that Mondelēz International is the moniker of the corporate global snack-foods unit that it will spin off by the end of this year, as announced last August.

"Mondelay," you say? Nay, nay! No need to dust off your high school French. The new name — pronounced "Mohn-dah-LEEZ" — is a Kraft-coined word that, the company explained in a press release, is intended to evoke the idea of "delicious world."

"Monde" derives from the Latin (and French) word for "world," the company explained, and "dēlez" is a "fanciful expression of 'delicious.'" And, of course, "International" captures "the global nature of the business."

Even though it won't be consumer-facing, pronunciation will be a challenge ("mon-de-lay," "mon-de-less," or "mon-de-leez"?) for the new name which was, as it turns out, employee-sourced.

Last fall, Kraft invited staffers around the world to suggest names and received suggestions from more than 1,000 employees. The winner was inspired by separate suggestions from two employees, one in North America and one in Europe.Continue reading...

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The world's second largest food company (annual revenues of about $49 billion) is home to eleven billion-dollar iconic brands: Cadbury, Jacobs, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, LU, Maxwell House, Milka, Nabisco, Oreo, Oscar Mayer, Philadelphia, and Trident.

But what about Kraft's smaller brands, at risk of being sent to the glue factory because of flagging consumer interest or meager ad budgets?Continue reading...