Tag: Starbucks

Homes Near Whole Foods Stores Appreciate Faster

Seth Anderson0 comment

Save Ten Percent with Pippin
Save Ten Percent with Pippin…

The real estate website Zillow has published a book which analyzes home values based on certain factors, such as the proximity to a Whole Foods, or Starbucks, etc. In a shocking coincidence, there are 2 Whole Foods within a mile of me (and three more slightly more than a mile away), there are 2 Trader Joe’s about a mile away, and a mind-boggling 44 ((!!) Starbucks within 1 mile of me, all per Google Maps. Perhaps there is a synergistic effect on property values, and a wealthy businessman from Shanghai will offer to purchase my place sight unseen for way, way above market value enabling me to retire to a private island in the Caribbean to work on my screenplay, or something. Do you know any wealthy industrialists with a desire to own a loft?

Your local grocery market has a lot to do with what happens in your local housing market, according to a new analysis by Zillow featured in the paperback edition of Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate (Grand Central Publishing, Jan. 26).

Specifically, Zillow found that homes grow more rapidly in value if they are closer to a Trader Joe’s or Whole Foodsi. Between 1997 and 2014, homes near the two grocery chains were consistently worth more than the median U.S. home. By the end of 2014, homes within a mile of either store were worth more than twice as much as the median home in the rest of the country.

“Like Starbucks, the stores have become an amenity in their own right – a signal to the home-buying public that the neighborhood they’re located in is desirable, perhaps up-and-coming, and definitely improving,” said Zillow Group Chief Economist Stan Humphries. “Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the stores may actually drive home prices. Even if they open in neighborhoods where home prices have lagged those in the wider city, they start to outperform the city overall once the stores arrive.”

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“The grocery store phenomenon is about more than groceries,” said Rascoff. “It says something about the way people want to live – in the type of neighborhood favored by the generations buying homes now. Today’s homebuyers seek things in neighborhoods that weren’t even in real estate agents’ vocabularies a generation ago: walkability, community, new urbanism – and maybe we should add words like sustainable seafood and organic pears.”

Zillow analyzed the values of millions of homes near dozens of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods to conclude that grocery stores and home values are definitely related.

According to the Zillow analysisii, the median home within a mile of a future Whole Foods store appreciates more slowly than other homes in the same city before the store opens. In the months before the stores open, the trend reverses and flips, so that after the stores’ opening dates, homes near Whole Foods appreciate more quickly than other area homes.

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The analysis clearly shows that homes near the stores appreciate more quickly than homes in the city as a whole. That means the two brands are very good at choosing locations that will appreciate faster in the future, or are actually spurring home appreciation growth – or some combination of the two.

(click here to continue reading Homes Near Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods Stores Appreciate Faster – Jan 25, 2016.)

Starbucks promises to eventually stop using dye made from crushed insects

Seth Anderson0 comment

Man on the Street interview
Man on the Street interview

Gross. Another reason to avoid Starbucks whenever possible.

Starbucks will cease using cochineal extract –a dye derived from crushed insects — to color select beverages and baked goods, according to a company blog post Thursday.

The company came under fire late last month when news that it was using the surprising ingredient lit up the Internet.

“As our customers you expect and deserve better — and we promise to do better,” Starbucks U.S. President Cliff Burrows wrote in the post. “After a thorough, yet fastidious, evaluation, I am pleased to report that we are reformulating the affected products to assure the highest quality possible.”

Lycopene will serve as the chain’s new red dye, and Burrows said he expects the changes to be in place nationwide by the end of June.

(click here to continue reading Starbucks to stop using dye made from crushed insects – chicagotribune.com.)

 (Tribune cited this blog post without providing the URL)

Treyf
Treyf

and all snakiness aside, you probably consume more cochineal extract than you realize: 

Today, it is used as a fabric and cosmetics dye and as a natural food colouring. In artist’s paints, it has been replaced by synthetic reds and is largely unavailable for purchase due to poor lightfastness. When used as a food additive the dye must be included on packaging labels. Sometimes carmine is labelled as E120. A small number of people have been found to have allergies to carmine, ranging from mild cases of hives to atrial fibrillation and anaphylactic shock, with 32 cases documented to date.  Carmine has been found to cause asthma in some people.  

Cochineal is one of the colours that the Hyperactive Children’s Support Group recommends be eliminated from the diet of hyperactive children. Natural carmine dye used in food and cosmetics can render the product unacceptable to vegetarian or vegan consumers. Many Muslims consider carmine-containing food forbidden (haraam) because the dye is extracted from insects, and Jews also avoid food containing this additive (even though it is not treif and some authorities allow its use because the insect is dried and reduced to powder).

Cochineal is one of the few water-soluble colourants that resist degradation with time. It is one of the most light- and heat-stable and oxidation-resistant of all the natural organic colourants and is even more stable than many synthetic food colours.  The water-soluble form is used in alcoholic drinks with calcium carmine; the insoluble form is used in a wide variety of products. Together with ammonium carmine, they can be found in meat, sausages, processed poultry products (meat products cannot be coloured in the United States unless they are labeled as such), surimi, marinades, alcoholic drinks, bakery products and toppings, cookies, desserts, icings, pie fillings, jams, preserves, gelatin desserts, juice beverages, varieties of cheddar cheese and other dairy products, sauces, and sweets.  Carmine is considered safe enough for use in eye cosmetics.  A significant proportion of the insoluble carmine pigment produced is used in the cosmetics industry for hair- and skin-care products, lipsticks, face powders, rouges, and blushes. A bright red dye and the stain carmine used in microbiology is often made from the carmine extract, too.The pharmaceutical industry uses cochineal to colour pills and ointments.

(click here to continue reading Cochineal – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)