Category: Industry

Catering Services have been an important sector of the countries like the United States. More than 8,000 catering companies in the USA record the annual revenue of more than $7 billion. The trend has been slowly growing in India, but it has recently adopted a fast-paced growth due to many reasons.

India is a country where numerous festivals and ceremonies are held in the form of important events. So, the scope of the catering industry in such a country is worth taking a note. The catering industry in the country is finally extending its reach beyond marriages and the Indian catering service providers are enjoying the good time. Here is an overview of the catering industry in India.

The catering services industry in India has been consistently growing at the annual growth rate of 15 to 20 percent. In 2009, the industry attained the worth of INR 15,000 crore. The good aspect about the Indian catering industry is that it didnt bear any major negative effects during the period of recession. So, what are the reasons for the consistent growth rate enjoyed by the Indian catering industry?

Interest in Catering Services

The members of the Indian families usually took care of different arrangements during a social gathering or an event. This trend is fast being replaced by the peoples interest in hiring catering services. This often results in better arrangements and opportunity for everyone in the family to enjoy the function.

Cross-region Specialties

Earlier, an event taking place in a family belonging to a particular region of India used to have cuisines preferred in that region. But, the scene has changed today, all thanks to the popularity of catering service providers. Now, a wedding taking place in Punjab has South Indian dishes in its menu. Cuisines from Gujarat, Bengal and other Indian states are included in the menu cards all over the country. This encourages people to hire the professional catering services.

Catering Institutes

It is indeed surprising to watch the growing number of hotel management and catering institutes in all parts of the country. Above all, the students are taking interest in joining the professional courses to make a career in the industry. So, the future of catering industry in India is going to be even better than the present situation.

Corporate Culture

Apart from the social gatherings and festive occasions, the formal events, seminars, conferences and other business related events consider professional catering services to add to the success of these events.

Family Style Restaurant

Restaurant based catering services too have improved in the country in the past few years. People, who are earning well in various fields and who have started living higher standards of life, prefer to choose dining venues with professional catering services.

The festival season of October and November in India is among the best times for the catering companies. Though, the industry doesnt rest for the remaining part of the year as well. Going further, the presentation and decoration used by the professional caterers further make them popular for various types of events. All of the aforesaid reasons justify the consistency in the Indian catering industry growth rate.

Advances in the cosmetic laser industry have made the laser a proven treatment option for many skin conditions. Cosmetic laser manufacturer Aerolase has developed the highly versatile LightPod Neo and efficient LightPod Era to meet the demanding needs of both physicians and clients.

Aesthetic dermatology is continually evolving to meet the needs of clients who are paying more and more attention to their skin and investing money in its care. Cosmetic laser treatment is a rapidly growing industry and has proven to be very profitable for healthcare practitioners. The cosmetic laser has become a formidable tool for dermatologists and health care practitioners. At the forefront of the cosmetic laser industry is Aerolase, manufacturer of the popular LightPod series of aesthetic laser. The LightPod Neo and LightPod Era are cosmetic lasers that can be used individually or together to perform a variety of cosmetic procedures safely and effectively. The LightPod Neo is a versatile cosmetic laser that can be used for a number of different applications.It is effective on a number of skin conditions, including minor wrinkles, scars, age spots, pigmented lesions and psoriasis to name a few. The LightPod Neo cosmetic laser is also FDA approved for use as a treatment against acne. This highly versatile cosmetic laser can also be used to treat vascular conditions, such as spider veins, leg veins and angiomas. In addition, the LightPod Neo can be used to perform pain-free hair removal and even tattoo reduction.

The LightPod Era is ideal for use on deep wrinkles and pigmented lesions, along with age spots and cutaneous lesions. It is an excellent resurfacing tool that can be used to refine and tone the skin while removing the telltale signs of aging and sun damage. Depending on the level of damage to the skin, the LightPod Era cosmetic laser can be employed to perform laser peels, gentle skin resurfacing or more radical resurfacing in conjunction with blepharoplasty to ensure overall skin rejuvenation. With the LightPod Era even the most stubborn wrinkles and age spots will be reduced and their appearance minimized.

Both cosmetic lasers employ Aerolase’s MicroPulse-1064 Technology. Thanks to Aerolase’s innovative internally air-cooled system, LightPod lasers can be safely usedon all skin types. Pain and discomfort are minimized and minimal recovery time is required, meaning patients can return to their normal routines with little to no down time and show off clear, healthy looking skin. LightPod lasers are designed to be compact and lightweight, making them very easy to store and to transport between locations. With their easy to use technology, high degree of versatility and compact, portable size, LightPod lasers offer physicians an excellent return on investment. Both physicians and clients will be pleased with the efficacy and efficiency of the LightPod series of cosmetic lasers.

David mark loves to share information about advanced laser technology and cosmetic laser solutions. He has been in this industry since last 10 years and talking about various laser removal equipments. In this article he is sharing his view on how to use cosmetic lasers.

Many people consider the impacts on industries that are directly related to the terrorist actions, such as the insurance industry. However, few consider the impact on an industry such as the events industry. While some people may not be able to see a link to the events industry as strongly as to an industry such as the airline industry, it is there. While there are many different types of events they all have some aspects in common. They all need attendees in order to occur or at least occur more than once. In order for an event to be successful people need to be drawn to the event and motivated to attend. There are many different factors that can persuade people to attend an event, but one of the main factors is whether they can get to the location of the event.

The ability to travel to an event for any attendee has now been seen to be endangered by Global terrorism. This is especially felt in regard to air travel since the tragic events in New York in 2001 which have lead to such huge changes throughout the world. People no longer feel as confident traveling to other countries on airplanes and as therefore less likely to attend events that require them to make use of that form of transport. Other forms of transport are also perceived as dangerous to use when traveling to an event in different areas of the world. This then limits the number of people who are willing to travel to a particular event, in particular well known people who may fear that they will be targeted during their journey to an event.

Global terrorisms effects may not be overtly visible, but they have lead to a curtailment of a completely carefree way of life. Many people can also fear to attend an event as it may be a magnet for terrorists who wish to make a statement by disrupting the event. The disrupting of a particular event due to the forces of global terrorism can take many forms. These forms could include protesting particular actions of parties associated of the event. Otherwise it could take the more dangerous form of violently targeting parties attending the event. This has lead to many people avoiding any event where many people are gathered or where subjects related to the event are seen as controversial by terrorist organizations.

Different events may carry a different level of risk for people attending them so a meeting of government agencies may be far more likely to be targeted than a musical event in a park. The importance or perceived importance of a particular event can also determine whether it could be targeted. The thought of being targeted by global terrorism is enough to prevent people from attending any event, which has lead to a great decline of many different types of events that may previously been well attended, particularly by people who are not local to the area. This has lead to a direct link between declining fortunes of the events industry and global terrorism.

September 19, 2013 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Mark Kastel, 608-625-2042

Organic Industry Watchdog: FDA Food Safety Rules Threaten to Crush the Good Food Movement

New Report Suggests Proposed Rules Could Drive the Nation’s Safest and Best Farmers Out of Business

http://www.cornucopia.org/2013/09/fda-food-safety-rules-threaten-crush-good-food-movement/ CORNUCOPIA, WI: After years of deliberation in Congress, interagency meetings, lobbyist activity, and a never-ending stream of food poisoning outbreaks, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is finally poised to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).

However, according to a just released white paper by The Cornucopia Institute at http://www.cornucopia.org/FoodSafety/, the FDA’s draft rules are so off the mark that they might economically crush the country’s safest farmers while ignoring the root threats to human health: manure contaminated with deadly infectious pathogens generated on “factory” livestock farms and high-risk produce-processing practices.

-In response to deadly outbreaks involving spinach, peanut butter and eggs, Congress acted decisively three years ago to pass the Food Safety Modernization Act,” said Mark A. Kastel, Codirector at The Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group based in Wisconsin. “Better oversight is needed but it looks like regulators and corporate agribusiness lobbyists are simultaneously using the FSMA to crush competition from the organic and local farming movement.”

Cornucopia’s report closely examines the FDA’s draft regulations (http://www.fda.gov/Food/guidanceregulation/FSMA/ucm334114.htm) for implementing the new food safety law, and a new FDA guidance (http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/Eggs/ucm360028) designed to control Salmonella in eggs produced by outdoor flocks. The report concludes that the new proposals would ensnare some of the country’s safest family farmers in costly and burdensome regulations in a misdirected attempt to rein in abuses that are mostly emanating from industrial-scale farms and giant agribusiness food-processing facilities.

Family farm advocates, and groups representing consumers interested in high-quality food, thought they had won a victory when the Tester/Hagan amendment was adopted by Congress exempting farmers doing less than $500,000 in business from the new rules. But Cornucopia’s report suggests the FDA seems more interested in a “one-size-fits-all” approach to food safety regulation.

In reality, the report suggests that small farms are not really exempt. The FDA is proposing that the agency can, without any due process, almost immediately force small farms to comply with the same expensive testing and record-keeping requirements as factory farms.

“In practical terms,” explains Judith McGeary, a member of The Cornucopia Institute’s policy advisory panel and Executive Director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, “the FDA will be able to target small farms one-by-one and put them out of business, with little to no recourse for the farmers.”

The FDA’s economic analysis also shows that farms over $500,000 (still small in the produce industry) will be significantly impacted with some being driven out of business.

“The added expense and record-keeping time will potentially force many small and medium-sized local farms – owner-operated, selling at farmers markets directly to consumers or to local grocers and natural food co-ops – out of business,” Kastel added.

The Institute’s analysis points out that the FDA has wildly inflated the number of foodborne illnesses that originate from farm production (seed to harvest rather than contamination that occurs later in processing and distribution).

It also alleges that the FDA has failed to recognize that specific processed crops such as fresh-cut, or produce grown in certain regions are the genesis of 90% of dangerous outbreaks in fruits and vegetables. In addition to imports from countries like Mexico, where the most recent Taylor Farms Cyclospora outbreak (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/business/taylor-farms-big-food-supplier-grapples-with-frequent-recalls.html?_r=0) originated, the evidence indicates that fresh-cut bagged/boxed salad mix and greens, other pre-cut vegetables and sprouts are much more prone to contamination.

“The proposed rule is a mess,” said Daniel Cohen, owner of Maccabee Seed Company, a longtime industry observer. “The FDA has much greater expertise on food safety issues from harvest to the consumer, but focused instead on farming issues from planting to harvest. Limited, modest, and more focused steps to improve on-farm food-safety could have produced simple, affordable, effective, and enforceable regulation.”

According to Cornucopia, the most important lost opportunity in the collaborative process between Congress, the FDA and the USDA is the lack of attention directed at the giant concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs (factory farms) raising livestock. The massive amount of manure stored at these factory farms is commonly tainted by highly infectious bacteria that have been polluting America’s air, water and farmlands.

“Federal regulators propose nothing to address sick livestock in animal factories and their pathogen-laden manure that is contaminating surrounding rural communities, nearby produce farms and our food supply,” Kastel lamented.

No More Organic Eggs?

The 2010 salmonella outbreak in eggs, centered in Iowa, shone a spotlight on industrial-scale egg houses confining thousands of hens in filthy and dangerous conditions.

The salmonella outbreak led to comprehensive regulation and new guidance for organic farmers. Organic farmers are required by federal law to provide outdoor access to their hens and the new FDA guidance, according to Cornucopia, materially undermines this management practice. And they are doing this despite scientific evidence tying higher rates of pathogenic contamination to older, massive factory farms with cages and forced molting (practices banned in organics) rather than raising birds outside.

“Their new guidance, on one hand, will make it difficult, expensive and maybe even impossible to have medium-sized flocks of birds outside,” Kastel stated. “At the same time, the FDA has colluded with the USDA’s National Organic Program to say that tiny ‘porches’, which hold only a minute fraction of the flock, will now legally constitute ‘outdoor access.’ This is a giveaway to conventional egg companies that are confining as many as 100,000 birds in a building and calling these ‘organic.'”

The Cornucopia Institute has publicly stated that they are investigating legal action against regulators if enforcement action is not taken, under the Organic Foods Production Act (http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELPRDC50603700), against the large industrial operations confining laying hens and broilers indoors.

The issue of food safety in Washington has been a contentious one, causing rifts even between nonprofits representing the interest of consumers and family farm organizations that have been historically aligned in support of organic and local food. Some consumer advocates pressed for no exemptions, even as farm policy experts have supplied evidence indicating smaller, family-operated farms are inherently safer.

“Only an idiot would not be concerned with food safety,” said Tom Willey, a Madera, California, organic vegetable producer and longtime organic advocate.

Added Willey: “The antibiotic resistant and increasingly virulent organisms contaminating produce, from time to time, are mutant creatures introduced into the larger environment from confined industrial animal operations across the American countryside. The FDA’s misguided approach could derail achievements in biological agriculture and a greater promise of food made safe through respect for and cooperation with the microbial community which owns and operates this planet upon which we are merely guests.”

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The Cornucopia Institute is a nonprofit organization engaged in research and educational activities supporting the ecological principles and economic wisdom underlying sustainable and organic agriculture. Through research and investigations on agricultural and food issues, The Cornucopia Institute provides needed information to family farmers, consumers, stakeholders involved in the good food movement, and the media.

The politics of punishment are tricky. Take the playground, for example. The boy in the striped shirt not only pushed your child out of the way at the top of the slide, but also gives your child a good kick for his efforts when he reaches the bottom. You can comfort your own child, but you can’t truly punish the boy in the striped shirt; he is a stranger. You can hope that his parents have a vigilant eye on the playground and will step in and say something, but that doesn’t always happen.

It’s even trickier to punish adults who are acting within legal parameters, if not moral ones. President Obama would like to create a tax to punish banks for effectively taking the bailout money and running. He is calling it a fee, but the proposal is actually for a 0.15 percent tax on the liabilities of large financial institutions. The tax only applies to companies with assets of more than $50 billion, a rather intimate group of about 50. (Reuters)

The tax is proposed to last 10 years and estimated to generate about 90 billion for the government, the majority of that from the ten largest banks. The question is who will really be paying? In all likelihood the banks will use creative accounting to sidestep the tax, as well as share the pain with bank customers in higher fees and tighter rules.

The idea behind the tax is that the Obama administration hopes this fee will give banks and other companies an incentive to whittle down burgeoning balance sheets. Even as President Obama defends the necessity of the bailout in the first place, he has criticized the banking industry for proposing nearly record-breaking bonuses. According to the Associated Press, “Six of the biggest U.S. banks are on track to pay $150 billion in total executive compensation for 2009, slightly less than the record $164 billion in 2007 before the financial crisis struck, according to the New York state comptroller’s office.”

The President is strongly suggesting that banks pay the fee out of the bonus pool, rather than find ways to pass the cost of the fee down to the customer. However, it is more likely that banks will keep the bonuses and find ways around the tax. Some of those solutions could involve risky loans, which is what started this whole mess in the first place.

While the President is insisting that Congress will pass the proposed bank tax, it is hardly a foregone conclusion. Republicans, not to mention the financial industry, is opposing it. And just what will the bankers spend all those billions in bonus money on? According to CNNMoney, at the top of the list is real estate. Bank execs will spend money on swanky New York apartments and European vacation homes. Also on the banking bonus wish list is private school tuition, expensive vacations, boats, cars and Botox. Yes, Botox. Apparently big time bankers need to look wrinkle-free to stay competitive.