Supermarket & Grocery Industry News

PITTSBURGH - Pittsburgh Brewing Co. here has replaced the glass bottles for its Iron City beer with aluminum bottles developed by Alcoa. The bottles have the potential to replace glass beer bottles across the country, according to an Alcoa official.

EDMONTON, Alberta - Planet Organic Health Corp., which operates natural food supermarkets in Edmonton, Victoria, Calgary, and Port Coquitlam, as well as a chain of supplement and market stores across Canada, said yesterday it had signed an agreement to acquire Halifax, Nova Scotia-based retailer Great Ocean Natural Foods.

STAMFORD, Conn. - Daymon Worldwide here, a leading private label sales and marketing firm, has named Barbara Simkins to the newly created post of director of retail services, to enhance the company's involvement in retail marketing, sales, and execution of private label brands directly at the store level.

WASHINGTON - Representatives from the food industry were on hand here late last week to offer their views on how the food pyramid might be improved -- or, at the least, better communicated to consumers -- as the Aug. 27 deadline nears for written comments on the issue.

WILTON, Conn. and WASHINGTON - The Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA), the trade group representing food, beverage, and consumer product companies, on Friday urged its members to use the trade channel definitions created and provided by TDLinx in their efforts to go to market.

MONROVIA, Calif. - Trader Joe's, based here, has decided to stop buying grocery bags from Federal Way, Wash.-based Weyerhaeuser, a company that the environmental advocacy group Rainforest Action Network (RAN) calls "the No. 1 destroyer of old-growth forests in North America."

NEW YORK ¿ Legislation has been proposed in New York state that would require a wide variety of grocery products be labeled as choking hazards to children under 4. The state bill, modeled on proposed national legislation that has been bandied about recently, would apply to nuts, hard candy, gum, peanut butter, and popcorn.

CHESHIRE, Conn. ¿ Bozzuto's, Inc., a wholesale grocer based here with annual sales in excess of $1 billion, plans to automate its existing pricing processes using TCI Solutions' TCI HQ for centralized price management and hosting, including using the software vendor's POS eXchange to interface with its Adams Super Food Stores' new point-of-sale systems.