A simple suggestion for Haiti

[clever_title]

Food aid, emergency tents, and inflatable hospitals may be a short short term priority for Haiti, but will never be the basis for rebuilding the country. You need a functional economy for that.

One thing that the government could do to help that along is to drop the trade restrictions on sugar imported from Haiti. Without the barriers imposed by

Comments

[kbhakkoah]

Nobody wants to help Haiti in a sustainable way. America wants to help Haiti enough to brag about it and feel good about ourselves, and then go back to not thinking about them. It's the way things are.

I like your idea. We don't have enough cane sugar in this country. That's part of why so many beverages use HFCS instead of sugar. Well, okay, it's cost and ease of processing, too. But the cost piece is primarily because HFCS is far more abundant than cane sugar. Evidently Pepsi had to temporarily halt production of their "throw back" (which is delicious, by the way, and I'm not crazy about soda) because there wasn't enough sugar. At least that's the story I heard.

[mizerychick]

Interesting. I was wondering how they were doing since they started showing ads for Throwback during the playoffs. We scored several cases of it before Christmas in one of those 4 for $10 deals and I haven't seen it in the supermarket since. No one even knew it existed last year and we had to request it special from the manager, but now there has to be a greater consumer awareness about the product.

It is yummy, though not as good as sugar Coke. I think it's the can vs. bottle thing.

[kbhakkoah]

It's also a different formulation. Coke and Pepsi taste different. And most people prefer one over the other. I would bet that if you like regular Coke better than regular Pepsi, then you would probably like sugar Coke better than sugar Pepsi. We buy Pepsi products exclusively, but that's where our bread is buttered.

I have had a hard time tracking it down for the most part. We did find it at the grocery store last weekend, and it was on sale to boot, but we had walked to the store that day and you had to buy 4 cases to get the deal. It was too much to carry back since we also needed milk and juice (and Mike won't let me carry anything heavy).

My friends found it in a plastic bottle in the convenience store market. Of course it comes at a premium (as with anything from C-store), but for the one-off bottle it works.

[mizerychick]

I really don't prefer Coke to Pepsi either way - both sugar ones are tasty and I don't care for either HFCS one, but I know I'm weird. I honestly think it's the can thing, since I have problems with other things in cans compared to glass or plastic bottle versions. Amstel is undrinkable in can version. I'm going to try to track a bottle down to test my theory.

And now I'm salivating for a soda. Why yes, I am the highly suggestable type.

[indieb0i]

Classic Coke for everyone!

[kbhakkoah]

Boo to you! No Coke for me!! :-).

Actually, there is a really interesting sensory study regarding why Coke switched their formula back in the 80s. According to their data, it was the right thing to do. Remind me to give you the details if you are interested.

Also, one of our R&D directors came here from Coke about 2 or 3 years ago. She said that while she was there, not a day went by that they didn't talk about New Coke. Talk about a disaster!

[indieb0i]

That switch has always fascinated me - more than your typical consumer - so I'd definitely be interested in reading the study. The most interesting take on it I ever heard was the suggestion that New Coke actually served the purpose of paving the way for HFCS to take the place of sugar.

[kbhakkoah]

The basics go something like this