Over the past week Earls Restaurants has stirred up commotion between producers and consumers over decisions in beef sources, but the issue may be a larger trend among food companies.
Last week, the Vancouver-based restaurant chain announced it would no longer purchase Canadian beef in favour of Certified Humane meat from the U.S.
After backlash and outrage from Canadian producers and industry, Earls reversed the change on Wednesday saying they "made a mistake."
Company president Mo Jessa says they stand by their decision to offer customers beef that meets specific audited standards for animal care and has never been treated with antibiotics or growth hormones, but he says unfortunately people misunderstood the term Certified Humane — which is a label under the Humane Farm Animal Care organization — getting the impression that beef not a part of this program was somehow being raised inhumanely.
"I want to clear that up," Jessa says, "I want to apologize to everyone that was impacted by it. Certified Humane means that we were looking for certification that validates cattle (have been) raised humanely."
While Earls is working to reverse this situation, this type of messaging is becoming more and more common among food companies, according to Charlie Arnot of the Centre for Food Integrity, a not-for-profit company focused on connecting consumers to food production.
"We've seen a significant increase in what's referred to as absence labeling," Arnot explains. "So 'free-from' either antiobiotics or hormones or GMOs or gluten — you can kind of pick your product and pick your ingredient — but we continue to see a greater move toward absence labeling as a way to indicate that if (a product) doesn't have (a certain ingredient), it must be better for me."
Arnot says this has been successful for marketers to appeal to consumers, although it hasn't been as positive for farmers — but he explains it's not the role of marketers to promote or defend agriculture.
Source : Portageonline