See our top 10 most read stories on businesses coping during lockdown, food safety concerns, and emerging consumer trends as a result of COVID-19.
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See our top 10 most read stories on businesses coping during lockdown, food safety concerns, and emerging consumer trends as a result of COVID-19.
Four major dairy industry associations in China had formed a set of guidelines for dairy and dairy product consumption for local residents in the hope of strengthening the public's immune health amid the COVID-19 novel coronavirus outbreak.
Dubbed the ‘Milk and milk-related products consumption guidelines for Chinese residents’, the guidelines were formulated jointly by the National Association of Health Industry and Enterprise Management, Chinese Nutrition Society, Dairy Association of China, and China Dairy Industry Association.
Government bodies and private companies were also involved in the crafting of these guidelines, namely the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Institute for Nutrition and Health, the Chinese Medical Doctor Association and Mengniu.
“With epidemic prevention, control and treatment at a critical stage in the country currently, science has shown that a balanced diet can help to improve nutritional health, enhance immune resistance and provide important nutritional support to combat diseases,” said the associations via a formal statement.
Chicken, pork and salmon samples contaminated with COVID-19 showed no decline in the virus level after 21 days in both refrigerated and frozen storage conditions.
In this preliminary report, researchers from Singapore and Ireland said this laboratory work showed that the SARS-CoV-2 can survive the time and temperatures associated with transportation and storage conditions in the international food trade.
There have been several reports of contaminated foodstuffs in the global supply chain, with China reporting SARS-CoV-2 detected on imported frozen chicken and frozen shrimp packaging material.
This ‘non-traditional’ transmission mechanism is being debated, but it is believed that contaminated persons can spread the virus on surfaces.
In May, the F&B industry in Malaysia called for food businesses in all states nationwide to ‘concurrently resume’ after the government loosened COVID-19 related lockdown restrictions, but has hit a snag when seven of the nation’s 14 states refused to fully restart operations.
Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced via a live broadcast that ‘almost all economic sectors and business activities will be allowed to operate from May 4’, including food manufacturing operations, after a lockdown that has lasted around six weeks since it was implemented in the form of a Movement Control Order (MCO) in March.
This loosening of restrictions had been deemed the Conditional Movement Control Order (CMCO).
The primary reason for this was clear: the economy. According to Muhyiddin, the country’s economy had been hit with daily RM2.4bn (US$556mn) losses since the MCO started to reach a total of RM63bn (US$14.6bn), and a further month of this would see another RM35bn (US$8.1bn) in losses.
Food and beverage authorities and industries worldwide were taking steps to prevent spreading or ‘importing’ the coronavirus into their countries, with some taking a more aggressive approach than others.
The coronavirus, dubbed 2019-nCoV, was first identified in Wuhan, China where most of the victims so far have been located. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the outbreak to be a global health emergency last month.
In response to the crisis, authorities in several countries have acted to ban the import of food items from China. One of these was Indonesia, which started with the ban of live animal imports from the country and is set to release a list of other banned food items soon.
“We will obviously stop live animals imports from China and are still considering banning other products,” Trade Minister Agus Suparmanto said in a media briefing after a government meeting about the virus.
In the wake of India’s nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19, Coca-Cola India, Nestle India and various other big MNCs in the country had called for F&B manufacturing to be made an ‘essential service’ in order to keep shelves stocked and avoid further panic.
India’s nationwide lockdown of some 1.3 billion people started at midnight on March 25 and was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi the evening of March 24 via a televised speech, barely four hours before the lockdown took effect, sending the country into a panic buying frenzy.
When the lockdown was announced, India had seen 536 COVID-19 cases and nine deaths – as of time of publishing, this number has already increased to 1,122 cases and 31 deaths.
"The entire country will be in lockdown, total lockdown,” Modi said.
“Seeing the present conditions, this lockdown will be for 21 days. This is to save India, save each citizen and save your family. Do not step outside your house. For 21 days, forget what is stepping outside.”
Many Singaporean consumers had shifted their purchasing behavior from offline to online shopping as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and experts had predicted that this shift would be a long-lasting one with effects long past the outbreak.
According to data from data analytics firm Nielsen, 37% of Singaporean consumers had increased online shopping activities since the COVID-19 outbreak, and over three-quarters (76%) had already indicated that they would not return to pre-outbreak online shopping levels.
Some 70% of consumers opted to shop online to stock pantries with FMCG items such as packaged foods and beverages, and 69% of those who had bought these goods online for the first time during COVID-19 were already planning to do so again within the next 12 months.
“The convenience and accessibility to products online, especially during COVID-19, have not only increased existing online shoppers' spend but also converted many offline shoppers to online. This trend is unlikely to return to pre-COVID status,” Nielsen Executive Director of Consumer Insights Garick Kea told FoodNavigator-Asia.
According to one expert in January, sales of live animals at wet markets across China should be banned in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.
COVID-19, the heart of an outbreak of viral pneumonia centred on Wuhan in China, was likely to have originated from snakes bought from a wet market and eaten.
After comparing the genetic information of the virus with information already available on other viruses, scientists had found the disease appears to have formed from a combination of a coronavirus found in bats, and another coronavirus originating from snakes.
This unique mix of proteins changed the shape of the receptors that allow the virus to bind onto and infect cells. Researchers said this recombination may have allowed cross-species transmission from snakes to humans.
Single-use, disposable food packaging appeared to have made a comeback rising on the coattails of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many consumers believed this to be safer and/or more hygienic – but are these beliefs truly warranted?
For some years now, sustainability had been a key trend and driver in the business and marketing strategies for many food and beverage companies in the Asia Pacific region such as Coca-Cola and Nestle especially after China banned plastic waste imports in 2018.
One of the main initiatives across many of these that have this focus had generally been to cut down on the use of single-use plastic bottles and packaging – but experts say it was likely that ‘companies may resort to plastic packaging to combat the spread of the pandemic, putting the sustainability aspect in the back seat’ again.
“Single-use packaging, which has faced lots of criticism in recent years because of environmental concerns, might be seen as a better packaging alternative from a ‘hygiene’ point of view because of limited handling/access of the inner products,” said insights firm GlobalData’s Practice Head of Consumer Beverages Arvind Kaila.
The COVID-19 pandemic risked causing widespread disruption to Asia’s commodities production, with wheat and rice set to be especially hard hit, according to a regional agricultural expert.
According to International Potato Center Asia Regional Director Samarendu Mohanty, the two crops would be most heavily impacted by the COVID-19 crisis if lockdowns and restrictions were not lifted soon.
“The biggest impact that COVID-19 is having on the world’s agricultural system is that of manpower displacement, especially for migrant workers. The supply chain in Asia is not as mechanized as that in the West, and we are very dependent on manpower for planting, harvesting, food movement and so on,” he told FoodNavigator-Asia.
“Rice is the biggest crop in Asia, and we are very near the normal planting season of end-April to May. The planting season is the time where the most manpower is required, and the lockdowns are causing a huge damper on the labour available.”
In March, Malaysia’s announcement that borders of the entire country would be closed for two weeks in an attempt to control the local spread of COVID-19 caused renewed panic in neighbouring Singapore, which imports large amounts of fresh produce from the country.
This was two-week-old Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s first major crisis announcement after ousting predecessor Tun Dr Mahathir Mohammad from Parliament in early March.
“The government’s priority now is to avoid the spreading of new infections, which will affect more people. [Therefore], drastic action needs to be taken [and] the government has decided to implement the ‘restriction of movement order’ starting from March 18 to March 31,” Muhyiddin said in a live telecast on March 16.
The order meant that all businesses would be temporarily close (except for retailers selling daily essentials like food), including all government and private premises not providing essential services (telecommunication, healthcare, utilities, etc.).
