In the wake of McDonald’s recent recall of 12 million "Shrek" promotional glasses, Congressional leaders have announced they will be launching an investigation into the effects of cadmium. The heavy metal, a known carcinogen if absorbed in high doses, was found in the enamel on the outside of the glasses, which were sold in McDonald’s stores beginning on May 21, prompting a federal review of cadmium guidelines. "In the last 60 days both Minnesota and Connecticut have regulated cadmium," said D. E. Fenton, executive director of the Quality Certification Alliance, an industry safety accrediting organization. "That’s a clear indication of where this is going."

In a letter sent to executives at McDonald’s, ranking members of Congressional oversight committees have requested the company provide documentation related to testing, lists of manufacturing and distribution companies and steps it plans to take to ensure supply chain safety. The manufacturer of the promotional glasses, a non-ASI-listed French company called Arc International, has been supplying products to McDonald’s for the last 15 years. The company has maintained that the glasses, which were produced at Arc’s Millville, NJ, facility, are safe and were properly tested. In a statement defending its procedures, Arc executives wrote: "McDonald's has confirmed that these products had been evaluated by an independent third-party laboratory, accredited by the CPSC and determined to be in compliance with all applicable federal and state requirements."  

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which has repeatedly warned manufacturers about the use of heavy metals, has not released the specific results of testing that led to the recall of the glasses. Currently, CPSC limits cadmium in children's products to 75 parts per million, but the regulating agency has strongly hinted that stricter and more encompassing guidelines are likely to come in the near future.

Cadmium, which is primarily used in leather tanning and pigment dyes, has clear health risks if exposure lingers over a long period of time. The Centers for Disease Control already lists cadmium as one of the 275 most hazardous substances in the environment. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, cadmium can be very toxic because it has a low permissible exposure limit, creating health dangers even when only trace quantities are found.

Organic cotton shirts help GA Dome save 100,000 gallons of water and 300 lbs. of pesticides annually.

Atlanta, GA (July 16, 2009) - Orangehalo, the #1 source for eco-friendly promotional products and branded apparel, today was awarded a contract by the Georgia World Congress Center Authority to provide uniform services for employees of the Georgia Dome.

The pique polo shirts selected by the GWCCA are made with GOTS certified organic cotton. Each shirt will conserve about 120 gallons of water versus a shirt made with conventional cotton. Additionally, by choosing organic cotton, the GWCCA has eliminated the use of more than 300 lbs. of pesticides. The Georgia Dome is the first major events facility in the country to utilize eco-friendly textiles in their uniform program.

"Orangehalo is always looking for ways to help our customers reduce their environmental impact," said David Solomon, president and chief executive officer of Orangehalo, LLC. "As the first and only exclusively eco-friendly promotional products and branded apparel company in the United States, our primary mission is to educate our customers on the importance of choosing eco-friendly products. Collectively, the decisions of relatively few people can and will have an enormous impact on the way in which promotional products, branded apparel and uniforms are brought to market. Our efforts in shaping consumer demand will help to drive fundamental change as manufacturers are reprogrammed to meet the needs of an environmentally educated consumer."

To learn more about how Orangehalo can help your organization, visit www.orangehalo.com, or contact Paul Watson, Executive Director of Business Development, at paul@orangehalo.com.

About Orangehalo
Orangehalo is the first and only exclusively eco-friendly promotional products company in the United States. With offices in Decatur, GA and Tustin, CA, Orangehalo is one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the country. To learn more, please visit www.orangehalo.com, www.orangehaloproducts.com, or call us toll-free at 800-322-0125.

By Rita Chang for Advertising Age

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) -- Spend on marketing, capital investment and innovation or risk losing your business within the next five years. That tough talk came from Del Monte Foods Co. Senior VP-CMO Bill Pearce at the Argyle Executive Forum's CMO Leadership Forum, where his keynote offered bold advice for navigating the titanic shifts that have resulted from the worst economic crisis since the Depression. In an environment where the name of the game is to manage risks, he challenged marketers to take them and offered eight tips for marketing in the downturn.

1. Don't scale back spending. The old way of dealing with a recession was to slash and burn head count, marketing and capital investment. But companies that do that are likely to be out of business in five years, Mr. Pearce said. "Now is not the time for across-the-board cuts," he said. "The worst thing you can do is make 10%-across-the-board cuts."

Instead, winnow out what doesn't work. Mr. Pearce said marketers need to evaluate every investment and raise spending on the vehicles that are paying off or look promising while cutting the ones that look dubious or break-even. "Get rid of it. If you think it's break-even, I guarantee you're losing money," he said.

2. Reassess your market. The recession has changed everything, and marketers need to keep a pulse on consumer behavior, which is "changing in ways we can't even begin to forecast," Mr. Pearce said.

The recession has triggered a global retirement crisis that will see many baby boomers work beyond their planned retirement years to recoup what the financial turmoil has chipped away from their nest eggs. "Do you think that's going to change how they think about goods and services? Do you think that's going to change how they spend money?" asked Mr. Pearce.

And it doesn't stop with baby boomers. Young people watching Mom, Dad and their grandparents toil into what should be their golden years are going to think very differently about spending too. They don't want to be caught in the kind of financial turmoil that hit their parents, so expect major behavior shifts from the younger set. "Demographic groups are undergoing life-transforming reversals of fortune," he said. "It's a life-altering, generational, scary change, and it's going to change how they make purchases."

3. Identify your best markets. Marketers have to find their most attractive markets, because they're not the same as they were a year ago. "There's no one market dynamic," Mr. Pearce said. "It goes block by block. There are people who can tell you which block is being hit the most [by the economic crisis] and where pockets of stability and growth are."

4. Do some homework. The three questions CMOs and marketers need to be singularly versed in are: Who are your most profitable customers? What are the emerging consumer trends? What are my most effective marketing and sales vehicles?

"You need to understand where your revenue is, because, I guarantee you, your revenue stream now is not where your revenue stream was 12 months ago," Mr. Pearce said. Knowing the answers to those three questions will help marketers figure out where to make investments. Those questions are also the ones that the company CEO or board is going to ask in times like these.

5. Value messaging isn't always about the lowest price. Tough times call for value messaging, but value messaging is not always about the lowest price.

Instead, know what motivates consumers today. Are they looking for brands to save them time? Money? Peace of mind? In this climate, people are often motivated by fear, such as fear of waste, he said. "What if I pay $20 for this service, and it doesn't work?"

6. Keep management in the loop. The goal is to proactively manage your CEO, whose instinct is to cut budgets. A CMO needs to have an ongoing relationship with the CEO. Marketers need to constantly measure everything they do to give CEOs a reason to raise budgets.

Making friends with the person who controls the purse strings is also recommended. Marketers need to constantly demonstrate to their chief financial officers the results and metrics of their investments. When the time comes to make the case to the CEO, you'll have the check writer on your team.

7. Invest in the future. Now's not time to shy away from new ideas, especially if they work. If your message is nine months old, it's stale, Mr. Pearce said.

The companies that invest in innovations and roll out new products and services when the economy makes a turn will reap disproportionate benefits, Mr. Pearce said, citing media, which is more cost-efficient now than it was 12 months ago.

Mr. Pearce's advice is to do what good stock-market investors do: When everybody's greedy, that's the time to take money off the table. When everyone's panicked, that's the time to double up.

8. Turn the crisis into opportunity. Del Monte sees the recession as a time to renew its message and strategy to fit with the new ways consumers are shopping, such as buying value sizes and shopping more at value chains, Mr. Pearce said. As other brands may be trimming their budgets, it's also a good time to make a play for those niches.

Del Monte, for instance, is moving from its traditional battleground in canned foods to expand the market space it plays in by more aggressively attempting to move consumers away from fresh and frozen foods.

By tmartin • April 3, 2009

A federal bill was introduced yesterday that, if passed into law, would remove restrictions on the cultivation of non-psychoactive industrial hemp. The chief sponsors of HR 1866, “The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009,” Representatives Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX), were joined by nine other U.S. House members split between Republicans and Democrats.

“It is unfortunate that the federal government has stood in the way of American farmers, including many who are struggling to make ends meet, from competing in the global industrial hemp market,” said Representative Ron Paul during his introduction of the bill yesterday before the U.S. House. “Indeed, the founders of our nation, some of whom grew hemp, would surely find that federal restrictions on farmers growing a safe and profitable crop on their own land are inconsistent with the constitutional guarantee of a limited, restrained federal government. Therefore, I urge my colleagues to stand up for American farmers and co-sponsor the Industrial Hemp Farming Act,” concluded Paul.

“With so much discussion lately in the media about drug policy, it is surprising that the tragedy of American hemp farming hasn’t come up as a ‘no-brainer’ for reform,” says Vote Hemp President, Eric Steenstra. “Hemp is a versatile, environmentally-friendly crop that has not been grown here for over fifty years because of a politicized interpretation of the nation’s drug laws by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). President Obama should direct the DEA to stop confusing industrial hemp with its genetically distinct cousin, marijuana. While the new bill in Congress is a welcome step, the hemp industry is hopeful that President Obama’s administration will prioritize hemp’s benefits to farmers. Jobs would be created overnight, as there are numerous U.S. companies that now have no choice but to import hemp raw materials worth many millions of dollars per year,” adds Steenstra.

U.S. companies that manufacture or sell products made with hemp include Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, a California company who manufactures the number-one-selling natural soap, and FlexForm Technologies, an Indiana company whose natural fiber materials are used in over two million cars on the road today. Hemp food manufacturers, such as French Meadow Bakery, Hempzels, Living Harvest, Nature’s Path and Nutiva, now make their products from Canadian hemp. Although hemp now grows wild across the U.S., a vestige of centuries of hemp farming here, the hemp for these products must be imported. Hemp clothing is made around the world by well-known brands such as Patagonia, Bono’s Edun and Giorgio Armani.

There is strong support among key national organizations for a change in the federal government’s position on hemp. The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) “supports revisions to the federal rules and regulations authorizing commercial production of industrial hemp.” The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) has also passed a pro-hemp resolution.

Numerous individual states have expressed interest in and support for industrial hemp as well. Sixteen states have passed pro-hemp legislation, and eight states (Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia) have removed barriers to its production or research. North Dakota has been issuing state licenses to farmers for two years now. The new bill will remove federal barriers and allow laws in these states regulating the growing and processing of hemp to take effect.

“Under the current national drug control policy, industrial hemp can be imported, but it can’t be grown by American farmers,” says Steenstra. “The DEA has taken the Controlled Substances Act’s antiquated definition of marijuana out of context and used it as an excuse to ban industrial hemp farming. The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009 will return us to more rational times when the government regulated marijuana, but allowed farmers to continue raising industrial hemp just as they always had.”

More information about hemp legislation and the crop’s many uses can be found at www.VoteHemp.com.

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter, Chicago Sun Times

The city that blazed a consumer protection trail by banning phosphates would become the first in the nation to ban baby bottles and cups containing the potentially harmful chemical bisphenol A, under a proposal advanced by a Chicago City Council committee today.

Tests of laboratory animals have linked the chemical, widely-known as BPA, to breast cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes and neurological disorders.

The federal Food and Drug Administration has come under fire for concluding there is no harm from the low doses of BPA that come from eating foods from containers made with the chemical.

Last year, Aldermen Edward M. Burke (14th) and Manny Flores (1st) introduced a measure that would have banned nearly all products made with BPA used by children under 7. That proposal never went anywhere.

Today, they unveiled a softer version and rammed it through a joint City Council committee after just a few minutes of testimony.

The new version would narrow the scope of the ban to "any empty bottle or cup specifically designed to be filled with food or liquid to be used primarily by a child under the age of 3."

Stores would be required to post signs alerting consumers that items are BPA-free.

Enforcement would be shared by three city departments: Health, Environment and Business Affairs and Consumer Protection. But, Burke acknowledged that the ordinance would be largely "self-policing."

"Each of these retailers has a license they're concerned about. They're not gonna do anything to jeopardize their ability to have a license to do business in Chicago," he said.

Canada and the state of Minnesota have already banned BPA containers. Retailing giants such as Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us and CVS have pledged to stop selling products packaged in those containers. Chicago would be the first city to join the crusade.

"As Chicago goes, so goes the nation," Burke said, pointing to the phosphate ban spearheaded by former Mayor Michael Bilandic.

"You'll see that, when this is adopted, there'll be other jurisdictions all around the country trying to climb on the bandwagon."

Flores added, "We cannot afford to wait any longer for the FDA to take no action."

Margy Belschak, 31, was pregnant with her now 16-month-old son Frankie when she learned that the bottles she planned to use to feed him contained a potentially-harmful chemical and that, "even small doses can be very toxic."

"I actually chose to use a baby bottle that was BPA-free, but I had to look very hard to find one ... to make sure that was the case," Belschak said.

As Frankie cried in her arms, almost on cue, Belschak said, "As parents, we have a lot of things to worry about. We really don't need to be worrying about safe baby bottles."

The only testimony against the ordinance came from Dr. Stephen Hentges, executive director of the American Chemistry's Council's BPA study group.

Hentges acknowledged that BPA is "one of the best-studied substances." But, he also said, "When that evidence, in its entirety, has been reviewed, the weight of evidence leads to the conclusion from these many regulatory bodies that bisphenol A is not a risk to human health."