NRD Holdings LLC, an Atlanta-based franchisee of quick-service restaurants, has diversified its portfolio with the acquisition of 23 Domino’s Pizza outlets in Florida Thursday.
NRD said it acquired all 23 Domino’s from Kostka Enterprises Inc. in St. Augustine, Fla., but declined to disclose the purchase price.
NRD already franchises the Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and Checkers Drive-in Restaurants Inc. brands.
Aziz Hashim, NRD’s president and chief executive, said his company purchased the Florida Domino’s locations because it wanted to expand into the pizza segment.
“We want a diverse portfolio, and we did not have a pizza operation,” Hashim told Nation’s Restaurant News. “We’ve been looking for a while to have a pizza brand. Pizza represents an affordable home-meal replacement."
He also said he was looking to establish a presence in the Florida foodservice market.
Seventeen Domino’s outlets are located in Jacksonville and six are in Orlando.
NRD operates 10 Popeyes locations in Atlanta and 21 Checkers/Rally’s locations in Atlanta, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
“We’re thrilled to have Aziz as part of the Domino’s franchise system,” Scott Hinshaw, Domino’s Pizza executive vice president of franchise operations and development, said in a statement. “His incredible track record of success, outstanding leadership and commitment to his diverse portfolio of brands make him the best of the best in the franchising industry.”
Popeyes presented Hashim with its “Emerging Leader” award in March, while Checkers honored him with its inaugural “Brand Ambassador” Award in 2010.
Hashim said he examined various pizza brands and concluded Domino’s was the best fit for NRD. He said the brand scored high in product and management team quality, and unit profitability.
Hashim also said he liked Florida as a foodservice market because even though the state has been impacted by the recession, he believed there was “a good chance to rebound in the future.”
Added Wendy Harkness, NRD chief talent officer and chief legal officer, “Florida has been a market we’ve long had our eye on.”
Contact Alan Snel at alan.snel@penton.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @AlanSnelNRN
Ingredients giant Barry Callebaut has confirmed its positive midterm outlook after posting a 7.3 per cent rise in sales volumes over the first nine months of the fiscal year.
Infected chicks and ducklings have sickened 71 people — more than half of them younger than 5 — in a growing multistate outbreak of Salmonella that now involves two different strains of the bacteria.
In an update on the outbreak tied to backyard poultry, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday that the number of Salmonella Altona infections is now up to 49 cases in 16 states, while another 22 people in 12 states have been infected with Salmonella Johannesburg.
Eighteen people have been hospitalized with severe diarrhea.
Most of those who are ill, or whose children are ill, reported buying the live poultry for either backyard flocks to produce eggs or as pets.
Traceback investigations have indicated that the chicks and ducklings were purchased from multiple locations of a national company, Feed Store Chain A, which says it obtained the poultry from the Ohio-based Mt. Healthy Hatchery,
More than half of the 71 people are younger than 5 years of age.
Here’s the breakdown on the number of illnesses by state:
As of June 27, a total of 49 individuals infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella Altona: Georgia (1), Indiana (1), Kentucky (5), Maryland (4), Michigan (1), Minnesota (1), New Hampshire (1), New York (2), North Carolina (8), Ohio (9), Pennsylvania (5), Tennessee (3), Virginia (4), Vermont (1), Wisconsin (1), and West Virginia (2).
As of June 27, a total of 22 individuals infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella Johannesburg: Alabama (1), Arkansas (1), Georgia (2), Kentucky (2), Maine (1), New York (3), North Carolina (3), Ohio (3), Pennsylvania (1), Tennessee (2), Vermont (2), and West Virginia (1).
Salmonellosis causes diarrhea, fever and painful abdominal cramps. Children are most likely to contract it, and young children are among the most likely to have severe infections.
In its update on the outbreak, the CDC once again reminded people that poultry can carry disease and that people handling chicks and ducklings need to take commonsense precautions:
– Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water right after touching live poultry or anything in the area where they live and roam. Adults should supervise hand washing for young children.– If soap and water are not readily available, use hand sanitizer until you are able to wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water.– Clean any equipment or materials associated with raising or caring for live poultry outside the house, such as cages or feed or water containers.– Do not let children younger than 5 years of age, elderly persons, or people with weak immune systems handle or touch chicks, ducklings, or other live poultry.– Do not let live poultry inside the house, in bathrooms, or especially in areas where food or drink is prepared, served, or stored, such as kitchens, or outdoor patios.– Do not snuggle or kiss the birds, touch your mouth, or eat or drink around live poultry.
A group of multinational consumer organizations has come together to demand that governments impose tighter controls on the use of antibiotics in food animals.
Last week in Brussels the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), a forum for European and American consumer advocates, approved a resolution calling on countries to ban the non-therapeutic use of farm animal antibiotics.
Antibiotics are given to farm animals for three reasons — either to treat an existing illness, prevent future diseases, or to promote growth.
Scientists have expressed concern that the widespread use of antibiotics on farms is contributing to bacterial resistance to these drugs, which poses a threat to human health.
The proposal recommends that governments ban the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in animals, and severely limit therapeutic applications of these drugs.
In the past, The World Health Organization has said that “National governments should adopt a proactive approach to reduce the need for antimicrobials in animals and their contribution to antimicrobial resistance and to ensure their prudent use (including reducing overuse and misuse), as elements of a national strategy for the containment of antimicrobial resistance.”
In 2006, the European Union forbid the use of most growth-promoting antibiotics in feed. Sweden banned the use of antimicrobials in feed without veterinary prescription in 1986, and Denmark outlawed all non-therapeutic antibiotics for food animals.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has released draft guidelines on the judicious use of animal antibiotics that point to a definitive link between the use of these drugs and an increase in antibiotic resistance among pathogens that affect humans.
The document concludes that “The use of medically important antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals should be limited to those uses that are considered necessary for assuring animal health.”
However no laws are currently in place in the U.S. against the sub-therapeutic use of animal antibiotics.
In its resolution, TACD made six key policy recommendations regarding food animal antibiotic use. These include:
– Banning the use of animal antibiotics for non-therapeutic purposes, i.e. for growth promotion
– Funding national systems to monitor antimicrobial use in food-production animals
– Requiring farmers to obtain a prescription from a veterinarian before administering antibiotics to animals, disallowing the prescription of any antimicrobials crucial to the treatment of humans.
– Improving health and hygiene management on farms to lessen the need for antimicrobials to treat and prevent disease
– Banning antimicrobials in crop/plant protection
– National health authorities should limit any unnecessary or uncontrolled use of antimicrobials in animals
“TACD believes action is urgently needed to control the emergence of resistant strains of zoonotic bacteria like Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli. These pathogens have developed resistance to multiple antimicrobials, and caused illnesses through the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans through the food supply,” the proposal says.
Indeed the current strain of E. coli O104 still ravaging Europehis said to be resistant to multiple animal antibiotics.
According to Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of Food Safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and co-chair of the TACD Food Policy Committee, the ongoing outbreak of E. coli O104:H4 in Europe signals a need for regulatory actions to protect the food supply, and controlling animal antimicrobials is one such act.
“The recent outbreak of foodborne illness in Germany illustrated the enormous challenge of food safety,” DeWaal said in a statement about the TACD agreement. “It is constantly moving, and governments must develop policies that anticipate problems before they erupt into major outbreaks.”
Sue Davies, chief policy advisor of the UK-based consumer group Which? and EU co-chair of TACD, also spoke about challenges facing food safety at the meeting.
”[It is] a critical time for food policy as many issues are coming together and need to be tackled effectively to ensure that consumers can make healthy and safe food choices – whether that’s expectations of quality, origin or the ability to act on ethical or other concerns,” she said.
A two-minute undercover video targeting Iowa Select Farms in Kamrar, IA and the retail outlets it supplies with pork products got some serious reaction after it was released Wednesday.
Iowa Select Farms, fourth largest pork producer in the United States, has retained Dr. Anna Johnson, associate professor of animal science at Iowa State University, to conduct an investigation into the farm’s animal handling.
Howard Hill, senior veterinarian for Iowa Select, says the pork producer has a zero tolerance policy for animal abuse. It has suspended at least one worker involved without play pending the outcome of Dr. Johnson’s investigation.
Iowa Select supplies pork to JBS Swift, which sells through such retailers as Costco, Hy-Vee, Kroger, and Safeway. Hy-Vee said it “will only do business with suppliers that are committed to the human treatment of animals.”
Chicago-based Mercy for Animals released the video taken by one of its operatives who reportedly hired on at Iowa Select Farms as an employee.
The short film alleged to show piglets being castrated and their tails removed without the benefit of anesthetics, intestinal ruptures apparently resulting form botched castrations, and workers throwing piglets across the room.
JBS issued a statement saying the company was shocked by the way piglets were being treated at Iowa Select Farms, and said it will ensure treatment in the future meets all National Port Board standards.
Safeway said it will “not tolerate animal abuse of any kind.”
Meatingplace, the industry news site, reported on industry speculation that the real target of the undercover video is the common use of gestation stalls, also known as crates.
Castration and docked tails, are done shortly after birth and there is no approved painkiller for the procedure. While not condoning tossing pigs about, the industry does defend the use of gestation stalls to protect piglets after birth from sows. Gestation crates are banned in seven states and Smithfield Foods is phasing them out of its operations nationwide.
In a letter Mercy for Animals sent to the retailers, the cruel acts shown in the video were being used as ”leverage to ban gestation stalls,” National Pork Producers Council spokesman Dave Warner told Meatingplace.
