5@5: Hain Celestial reports increasing sales at Whole Foods | Almond grower creates a backup bee
Each day at 5 p.m. we collect the five top food and supplement headlines of the day, making it easy for you to catch up on today's most important natural products industry news.
February 21, 2018
Hain Celestial CEO says Whole Foods sales are increasing despite Amazon price cuts
Hain Celestial CEO Irwin Simon, whose company has more than 1,500 products stocked at Whole Foods, has seen costs fall and volume of sales increase since Amazon completed its purchase of the brick-and-mortar natural grocer. Read more at CNBC …
Building a backup bee
Almond trees need lots of bees—1.9 million colonies of them—to produce the popular nut that is California’s second-largest crop. Unfortunately, honeybees are suffering from a variety of diseases and pesticide exposure, threatening a collapse of the entire $21 billion (in California alone) almond industry. To ward off such a disaster, Gordon Wardell, director of bee biology for the Wonderful Company, has been developing the blue orchard bee. It’s a been a slow process, but he will put his new bees through their biggest test this year, when he expects to deploy 128,000 female blue orchard bees in the field. Read more at Food & Environment Reporting Network …
No-till farmers’ push for healthy soils ignites a movement in the plains
Every year, 1.7 billion tons of farmland is lost to erosion. While we might think first of what could be grown in that amount of soil, we also must realize that the nitrogen it contains is damaging our lakes and oceans, as well as releasing greenhouse gases back into our atmosphere. No-till farming restores farmland and could be key to solving drought, nitrogen pollution, climate change and other environmental disasters. See how this farming method fits in the regenerative agriculture movement. Read more at Civil Eats …