Starbucks today announced its lightest coffee yet: Starbucks Blonde Roast. The java purveyor says more than 80 recipes were tested before settling on this blend, which will come in two varieties, Veranda and Willow, and become available at Starbucks retail stores as well as in its grocery stores (as packaged whole bean, roast and ground) starting in January. With the move, Starbucks' beans will be called Blonde, Medium and Dark.Continue reading...

Walmart has long said that has no interest in the business of selling lottery tickets. But the company is interested in keeping its customers satisfied. So a pilot program is about to get underway this week in Florida, where 27 Walmart stores will test selling tickets in a limited market trial.

"We want to offer products our customers want," commented Tara Raddohl, a company spokeswoman, to the Miami Herald. "We did some initial research and we determined it would be a good market to pilot in."

The growth of Walmart’s smaller neighborhood-market stores is what brought about the change in thinking from the Arkansas-based company.Continue reading...

When you think Walmart, you generally think big and you don’t generally think groceries, but its Neighborhood Market stores may change that.

Chicago opened its third Walmart this week, but this is a Neighborhood Market store, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. At about 27,000 square feet, the downtown store is a fraction of a regular-sized Walmart, which can be as large as 150,000 square feet.

And while groceries are typically 1/3 of the product sold at a Walmart, it takes up ¾ of the Market, the paper reports. Walmart has been opening Neighborhood Markets since 1998 and now has 155 nationwide, but they are about to go into a boom time, with the company planning to have 300 of them by 2013, the Sun-Times reports.Continue reading...

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is making a major push at expanding internationally as well as building a major multibillion-dollar business in the grocery industry.

"I think we have an enormous opportunity to do a lot of things in the food and beverage industry," Schultz told the German magazine Der Spiegel. "In the next 12 to 18 months, we will be unveiling new products and entirely new categories. I can't tell you with specificity what it is, but we're going to build a major multibillion-dollar business in the grocery industry for Starbucks, both domestically and around the world. I think people are going to be quite surprised over the next few years at what Starbucks is capable of doing."

And at top, British singer Wesley Stace (better known by his stage name, John Wesley Harding) just released the video for his song, There's a Starbucks (Where the Starbucks Used to Be). It's not just Starbucks that gets roasted, either ("There’s a Walgreen’s where there were no walls, just greenery") in this debut track off his new album.

Kraft Foods CEO Irene Rosenfeld plans to accelerate her transformation of the mainstream-foods giant, which boasts 61 brands today, by spinning off its North American grocery unit, a move that she anticipates will free both that business and the remaining snacks business to do better what they do best.

According to the company's announcement, Kraft's grocery entity, with about $16 billion in annual sales, will include the U.S. units handling many of Kraft’s most venerable brands including Jell-O desserts, meats under the Oscar Mayer brand, cheese, convenient meals and other food items that are slower-growing but higher-margin businesses. Those established units, Rosenfeld said, can be counted on to continue to return cash to shareholders.

The other side of the operation, a snacks company that represents about $32 billion in annual revenues, will be built from European and developing-markets units as well as the North American snacks and candies business. This will be the more dynamic of the two large concerns as it pushes Kraft snack products such as Cadbury chocolates and Oreo cookies into emerging markets.Continue reading...

Grape Nuts, Honeycomb, Shredded Wheat, Raisin Bran, and plenty of other cereals have been starting Americans' days for a long time, no matter who has owned them. 

Since 2008, it has been St. Louis-based Ralcorp Holdings. Inc., a manufacturer of private-label goods for US grocery stores including Stop & Shop, IGA and Hannaford, which produces cereals in its Ralston Foods division.

Ralcorp bought the organization from Kraft Foods for $2.7 billion. Now, Ralcorp finds itself the target of an unwanted takeover attempt by ConAgra Foods, which has offered $4.9 billion, according to FoodProcessing.com.Continue reading...

It’s a long-running conundrum for better-for-you food and beverage marketers: How do you leverage a “natural” positioning for new, healthful products compared with marketing new “organic” items?

USDA standards have defined and regulated organic labeling for several years now, but the meaning of “natural” is something that still remains unaddressed by regulators and, consequently, by marketers.

American consumers remain vastly confused by the two terms, with studies showing that they tend to credit many more important nutrition and health attributes to products labeled “natural” than they do to those labeled “organic” – even though the latter are the only ones consumers really can count on.Continue reading...

In the midst of a soft economy, consumers don't want to pay higher prices for products they've grown accustomed to buying. But inevitably, manufacturers' costs go up and profit margins need to be protected. 

So how do product prices remain stable? In the past year, the answer — at least in the US — has been to downsize packaging.Continue reading...