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Take Out with Bob Weeks

Bob Weeks began his publishing career in the early 1970's and served in several different capacities with Bill Communications and Freed Crown Lee Publishing before becoming Publisher of Dairy Foods and Prepared Foods magazines at Gorman Publishing. In 1991 he set out on his own, establishing Weeks Publishing Company with the successful launch of Food Product Design Magazine which subsequently became and remains today the preeminent food development and R&D focused publication/information source. Bob continued as Publisher of Food Product Design as well as Culinology magazine after being acquired by Phoenix-based Virgo Publishing LLC. in 2005. His 23 years in food publishing have established Bob as one of the foremost thought leaders in the food industry.

Going Pro-active for PB

February 25, 2009 Bob Weeks Comments

Posted in Blog

After taking a beating in the world of media reporting, the National Peanut Board is taking some very high-profile steps to counteract all the negative publicity that has cast doubt in consumer minds as to the safety of products containing peanuts or peanut ingredients. Full page ads in a variety of media outlets are alerting people to upcoming events. The first of these events is taking place on March 4 and 5 in New York City at the Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Station. Set up as a Q and A session and product tasting open to the consumer public, this is the first of many events set to take place across this country in the coming months. This is a very good start in what will necessarily be a long and difficult effort to get the consumer public ( and the media) to focus on and understand that the recent salmonella outbreak was caused by the actions of one rogue company and is not reflective of the peanut industry as a whole.

In addition to these high-profile events, people are being encouraged to visit the National Peanut Boards' website at www.nationalpeanutboard.org to gain access to information on the continuing safety of the wide variety of healthful products that contain peanuts or peanut based ingredients.

Let's hope the media will give peanut growers and processors some equal time to state their case to the consumer public. That may be asking a lot considering that "bad" news is usually deemed more "newsworthy", but we can hope the media realizes it has an obligation to report both sides of the story.

As for me, I'm now going to make a peanut butter sandwich for my lunch.