Not since Babe, has a pig won our hearts, until now.

Meet Ginger, the star of ‘A Pig’s Tail,’ a short animated film about the horrific conditions of industrial pig farming. Intended primarily for children, but accessible to all, the film follows Ginger’s determination to escape after she is taken from her mother.

Breeding pigs are confined day and night during their four-month pregnancy in gestation crates, cages roughly the same size as the animals’ bodies, preventing them from even turning around. The pigs are then placed into another crate to give birth, re-impregnated, and put back into a gestation crate. This happens pregnancy after pregnancy for their entire lives, adding up to years of virtual immobilization.

‘A Pig’s Tail’ was produced by The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), along with Academy Award-winning Aardman Studios, creators of “Chicken Run,” and “Wallace and Gromit,” with a grant from the Steven C. Leuthold Family Foundation.Continue reading...

As global economic bellwethers go, McDonald's sales results probably rank right up there with oil prices and consumer-confidence measures. So its shareholders, analysts and executives aren't exactly lovin' it when the company reports lackluster results, as it did for the third quarter.

The fast-food leader reported weaker-than-expected earnings for the period as it battled a weak global economy and accommodated more budget-minded consumers from Europe to China. Both sales and profits fell during the quarter, a rarity for McDonald's.

Of course, McDonald's results aren't directly synonymous with the status of the world's appetite for quick fare. The stronger dollar hurt international sales too. Also, competitors in many markets have been upping their game lately, including both Burger King and Wendy's in the United States, and the new strains from rivals also are reflected in McDonald's results.Continue reading...

The latest in the McDonald's Canada transparency campaign, which answers customer queries with videos posted on its YouTube channel, reveals the journey of the McDonald's French fry. The fast food giant's latest earnings report indicates that brand needs to regain global momentum.

Two years ago, Bolthouse Farms excited childhood-obesity activists with an innovative marketing campaign to get more kids chomping on baby carrots with the tagline, "Eat 'Em Like Junk Food." The initiative helped Bolthouse Farms reignite its long-quiescent sales of baby carrots and presumably played a role in making the Bakersfield, Calif.-based company attractive enough to be acquired by the Campbell Soup Company earlier this year.

Now, Bolthouse has come up with a second act for its baby carrots marketing: Shakedowns, all-natural dry seasonings that coat baby carrots in a bag. Baby boomers might be reminded of the classic Shake N Bake Chicken that their moms used to, well, shake and bake, because they're the target for Shakedowns as much as their kids are.

"We were introducing [a focus group] to the 'junk food' campaign, and teenagers there were saying, 'Well, why don't you season [baby carrots] like Doritos?" Todd Putman, CMO for Bolthouse Farms, told brandchannel. "We thought, 'OK, how do we do that?' We went on a long innovation journey. But we immediately thought it was a great idea."Continue reading...

Dunkin’ Donuts thinks it can have a winner with the bagel centers, just as it did when it turned doughnuts on their glazed heads and created Munchkins, sparking a doughnut hole war in the U.S. with Canada's Timbit-flinging Tim Hortons chain. As spotted by the Boston Globe, the people that brought you America Runs on Dunkin' filed for a “Bagel Bunchkin” trademark back in May and plans to use it to sell bite-size bagel pieces in the U.S.

The chain already has a pretty good lock on bagel sales, as the biggest seller of bagels among quick service restaurants in the U.S. Two years ago, it launched Bagel Twists, but is now looking to expand its bagel offerings. However, it may not be able to move forward with their desired name.

The US Patent and Trademark Office “tentatively rejected the Dunkin’ application, noting that the Fred Meyer Stores supermarket chain already registered the rights to the name ‘The Bagel Bunch’ for its traditional bagel line,” the Globe notes. Dunkin’ Donuts is nearing the end of the time window to appeal.Continue reading...

Everything that Taco Bell has been doing right lately have boosted results at its parent company, Yum! Brands. And Yum's other major QSR brands in the U.S., Pizza Hut and KFC, are contributing to the uptick as well. Yum's profits jumped 23 percent for the third quarter on stronger results in the U.S. even while its fast-track growth in China, another crucial market, was held back by the cooling economy there.

"Our China business is having another strong year," Yum CEO David Novak told industry analysts on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. "But as I've said before, China is going to have its inevitable ups and downs... We are now facing a slowing economy. But that doesn't change our outlook in China one iota. Our annual performance has been pretty consistent, and we expect that to continue."Continue reading...

Take that, David Einhorn. [Photo: AP via Buzzfeed]

When the color purple comes up in conversation, many automatically think of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel that told the story of 1930s African American women in rural Georgia or the excellent film version that showcased just how underrated as actresses Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg could be. Others think of Donny Osmond’s socks. Parents of preschoolers may associate it with that unwieldy dinosaur Barney.

But to a group of folks in Birmingham, England (and another in Northfield, Illinois), purple is the color of money. And they’ll do everything they have to to hang onto their own particular shade of the color. For years, Cadbury, the candy maker based in Birmingham and owned by Kraft Mondelez, has been doing battle with Nestle over a particular shade of purple that it received trademark rights to back in 2008.

The fight seemed to reach an endpoint late last year when the registrar at the UK Intellectual Property Office decided that Cadbury was within its rights to ask for Pantone 2865c to be exclusively theirs for chocolate products and drinks. After all, Cadbury had been using that particular shade since 1914 in honor of Queen Victoria.Continue reading...