Value-Added Meat: Measuring Past Successes and Predicting Future Winners

Livestock industries are significantly affected by changes in consumer behaviour. In order to add value to meat and livestock production, many firms and farms are supporting the development of new products – these products can differ by credence attribute, by degree of processing and by marketing strategies. The literature suggests that one of the most important determinants of success in product innovation is an understanding of the market the product is introduced into. In this report consumer preferences for meat products, by animal species including minor meats, and by type of processing are examined. Responses to economic variables such as price, advertising and income are identified as are responses to food safety and meat related health issues. Interesting results include the fact that income elasticities of demand for meat products purchased at grocery stores are negative in this study and that own and cross price elasticities for certain meats, across processing levels for example, show strong substitutions. Thus introducing new meat products may not result in increased sales by animal species but may only result in substitution of one meat type product for another product of the same meat type. Successful new product introductions or changes in product quality are shown, in this report, to be accompanied by significant marketing/advertising investment and, either by design or by serendipity, to have credence attributes in line with consumer's changing concerns. An example of this is the response in branded chicken sales, at the time of BSE in Canada, for a brand that could advertise itself as being 100% grain fed. Marketing strategies, such as working with the Health Check™ program of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada are shown to have an impact on firm level sales (as well as on sales at the individual product level), a halo effect, that may be of importance in the firm's development of other value-added products. Significant heterogeneity exists in consumer behaviour and it is important to recognize this heterogeneity in the development of value-added meat products. Added to the consumer heterogeneity, in general, is the heterogeneity in responses by meat type. What works for one sector, such as poultry, could be problematic in other sectors given differences in economic interrelationships reported in this study.meat, consumer behavior, value-added, strategic behaviour, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing, D12, Q18,

Quantifying uncertainty in health impact assessment: a case-study example on indoor housing ventilation.

Quantitative health impact assessment (HIA) is increasingly being used to assess the health impacts attributable to an environmental policy or intervention. As a consequence, there is a need to assess uncertainties in the assessments because of the uncertainty in the HIA models. In this paper, a framework is developed to quantify the uncertainty in the health impacts of environmental interventions and is applied to evaluate the impacts of poor housing ventilation. The paper describes the development of the framework through three steps: (i) selecting the relevant exposure metric and quantifying the evidence of potential health effects of the exposure; (ii) estimating the size of the population affected by the exposure and selecting the associated outcome measure; (iii) quantifying the health impact and its uncertainty. The framework introduces a novel application for the propagation of uncertainty in HIA, based on fuzzy set theory. Fuzzy sets are used to propagate parametric uncertainty in a non-probabilistic space and are applied to calculate the uncertainty in the morbidity burdens associated with three indoor ventilation exposure scenarios: poor, fair and adequate. The case-study example demonstrates how the framework can be used in practice, to quantify the uncertainty in health impact assessment where there is insufficient information to carry out a probabilistic uncertainty analysis

Retarded versus time-nonlocal quantum kinetic equations

The finite duration of the collisions in Fermionic systems as expressed by the retardation time in non-Markovian Levinson-type kinetic equations is discussed in the quasiclassical limit. We separate individual contributions included in the memory effect resulting in (i) off-shell tails of the Wigner distribution, (ii) renormalization of scattering rates and (iii) of the single-particle energy, (iv) collision delay and (v) related non-local corrections to the scattering integral. In this way we transform the Levinson equation into the Landau-Silin equation extended by the non-local corrections known from the theory of dense gases. The derived nonlocal kinetic equation unifies the Landau theory of quasiparticle transport with the classical kinetic theory of dense gases. The space-time symmetry is discussed versus particle-hole symmetry and a solution is proposed which transforms these two exclusive pictures into each other.Comment: slightly revised, 19 page

Molecular Momentum Transport at Fluid-Solid Interfaces in MEMS/NEMS: A Review

This review is focused on molecular momentum transport at fluid-solid interfaces mainly related to microfluidics and nanofluidics in micro-/nano-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS). This broad subject covers molecular dynamics behaviors, boundary conditions, molecular momentum accommodations, theoretical and phenomenological models in terms of gas-solid and liquid-solid interfaces affected by various physical factors, such as fluid and solid species, surface roughness, surface patterns, wettability, temperature, pressure, fluid viscosity and polarity. This review offers an overview of the major achievements, including experiments, theories and molecular dynamics simulations, in the field with particular emphasis on the effects on microfluidics and nanofluidics in nanoscience and nanotechnology. In Section 1 we present a brief introduction on the backgrounds, history and concepts. Sections 2 and 3 are focused on molecular momentum transport at gas-solid and liquid-solid interfaces, respectively. Summary and conclusions are finally presented in Section 4

Value-Added Meat: Measuring Past Successes and Predicting Future Winners

Livestock industries are significantly affected by changes in consumer behaviour. In order to add value to meat and livestock production, many firms and farms are supporting the development of new products – these products can differ by credence attribute, by degree of processing and by marketing strategies. The literature suggests that one of the most important determinants of success in product innovation is an understanding of the market the product is introduced into. In this report consumer preferences for meat products, by animal species including minor meats, and by type of processing are examined. Responses to economic variables such as price, advertising and income are identified as are responses to food safety and meat related health issues. Interesting results include the fact that income elasticities of demand for meat products purchased at grocery stores are negative in this study and that own and cross price elasticities for certain meats, across processing levels for example, show strong substitutions. Thus introducing new meat products may not result in increased sales by animal species but may only result in substitution of one meat type product for another product of the same meat type. Successful new product introductions or changes in product quality are shown, in this report, to be accompanied by significant marketing/advertising investment and, either by design or by serendipity, to have credence attributes in line with consumer's changing concerns. An example of this is the response in branded chicken sales, at the time of BSE in Canada, for a brand that could advertise itself as being 100% grain fed. Marketing strategies, such as working with the Health Check™ program of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada are shown to have an impact on firm level sales (as well as on sales at the individual product level), a halo effect, that may be of importance in the firm's development of other value-added products. Significant heterogeneity exists in consumer behaviour and it is important to recognize this heterogeneity in the development of value-added meat products. Added to the consumer heterogeneity, in general, is the heterogeneity in responses by meat type. What works for one sector, such as poultry, could be problematic in other sectors given differences in economic interrelationships reported in this study