Vir Sanghvi On His Favorite Cookies

     Vir Sanghvi  India s Ace  political commentator  turns  his attention towards  his  favorite  biscuits and cookies . An article in HT  Brunch . Knows  a lot on  Biscuit market and trade .

Not only has it been a long time since Britannia ruled the waves, it has also been many years since Britannia ruled the Indian biscuit shelves. In my youth, Britannia and biscuits were synonymous. You had the Parle Gluco biscuit of course (apparently the largest-selling biscuit in India in that
era), but the ones that ordinary middle class families like ours chose to buy were Britannia’s versions of such British favourites as Bourbon, Marie, Thin Arrowroot and Nice (pronounced, we were told, like the city in France – not that it mattered as long as we got to eat the layer of sugar on the outside.)

I discovered later that this had to do with Britannia’s original corporate parentage (British companies with such reassuringly dated names as Huntley-Palmer) and the colonial desire to export great British brands to each corner of the empire.

Then, the Brits got taken over by Americans. Such giant conglomerates as RJR Nabisco (maker of the mighty Oreo which is to the US biscuit – sorry, cookie! – market what Coca Cola is to its soft drink sector) were placed firmly in control and the sweet old colonial brands started vanishing. Eventually, it all got very complicated with Nabisco being taken over by Wall Street bankers, Indian Britannia being sold, its new owners fighting with its new French partners etc. etc.

In any case, I am assured now that this avatar of Britannia, part of Nusli Wadia’s empire, has its own Indian identity and is so successful that foreigners try and steal its brands (Tiger biscuits, for instance). Fair enough. But two points are worth making. One: it is not the Britannia I grew up with. (But then, this is not the India I grew up in either so I guess that’s only to be expected.) And two: that the relaxation of food imports means that the shelves at my local grocer’s groan under the weight of so many imported biscuits and cookies from all over the world that the biscuits of my childhood (the great Britannia varieties) end up being relegated to the back of the shop while fancy expensive biscuits with French and German packaging occupy pride of place.

Source

All In Good Taste - Hindustan Times

Dioxin Tainted Food Scare Across EU

 Eggs  are one of the prime ingredients in   bakery products  such as Cakes , Pastries , Cookies & Buns . Dioxin scare has  affected  bakery manufacturers in a way that  retailers  have started taking off  bakery products from shelf  as reported in  UK & Ireland .It all started when Oil meant for industrial  use went as animal feed to poultries

A  report

The contaminated eggs with toxic dioxin from Germany are panicking consumers across Europe as they are suspected to have entered the UK food chain. It is understood that 14 tonnes of tainted egg product sent to the Netherlands from Germany, destined for use in goods such as pastries and mayonnaise, had been re-exported to Britain.

Earlier this week, the German authorities said up to 3,000 tonnes of contaminated feed, which are only meant for industrial use - were sent to poultry and pig farms, and that eggs from some of the farms were then exported to the Netherlands for processing. The origin of the feed contamination has been traced to a distributor of oils for animal feed production in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where oils meant for industrial use in biofuels were distributed for animal feed.

The German agriculture ministry has said that 4,709 farms were being closed as a precaution, and the suspected toxin fed chickens about 8000 were so far culled. Eight of Germany’s 16 states were affected by closure order.

The European Commission health spokesman Frederic Vincent said in Brussels that it was still unclear if those eggs contained dioxin. However, tests of other eggs from suspected farms were found to contain up to five times the EU’s limit for dioxin.

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German Dioxin-tainted Food Scare Heightens across EU