Food, in brief

Food firms cutting prices to sell more

Nestle's prices rose just 1.1% in July to September, and selling more food did most of its growing. [1] Kroger, the biggest US chain that sells only groceries, will spend $5 billion on lower prices after its sales stalled. [9] PepsiCo is adding protein bars as shoppers cut back on its snacks. [37]

Less US food aid

More than 5 million people left SNAP, the US food-aid programme, in the year to June 2026. [5] A rule the US Department of Agriculture proposed on Wednesday would push much of the cost of new chip cards for that aid onto states. [4] The actor Martin Sheen called for USAID, the US foreign aid agency shut in 2025, to come back. [22]

Disease in farm animals

Newcastle disease, a bird virus, stopped chicken from one Brazilian state going to China and from all of Brazil going to Mexico. [3] Northern Ireland's farm scientists forecast a high risk of liver fluke, a worm that attacks cattle and sheep, this winter. [35]

Rules over farm water

California dairies sued to block limits on nitrate from manure reaching drinking water wells. [13] An Idaho farm family is suing after the state shut off its groundwater in April. [14] Nebraska researchers won $1 million to find nitrate hiding deep under farmland. [25]

3 pressures seen across the day run through Food too.

• Dearer fuel from the Iran warHigh ↑ · seen in 5 beats→
• Germs crossing borders and speciesBuilding ↑ · seen in 2 beats→
• US public money shrinking or coming with conditionsBuilding ↑ · seen in 3 beats→

1. 1Nestle, the world's biggest food company, sells 2.8% more by volume as its price rises slow to 1.1%, and drops Russia from its accounts
2. 2China blocks chicken from one Brazilian state
3. 3US proposes chip cards for food aid
4. 4West Virginia's food aid shrinks
5. 5Kroger to spend $5bn cutting prices

Nestle, the Swiss company behind Nescafe, KitKat and Purina pet food, said on Thursday its sales grew 4% in July to September, leaving out currency swings and businesses bought or sold. [1]

Watch whether Nestle keeps selling more food in the last three months of 2026, now that its price rises are down to about 1%. [1]

Brazil reported Newcastle disease, a highly contagious bird virus, at a turkey farm in Santa Catarina state on Monday. [3]

Under a deal between the two countries, a case first stops poultry from all of Brazil going to China, until China decides how wide the ban should be. [3]

On Tuesday Brazil's farm ministry said China had agreed to block only Santa Catarina, which raises about 15% of Brazil's poultry. [3]

Chile also blocked that one state, but Mexico stopped poultry from all of Brazil. [3]

Brazil is the world's biggest exporter of chicken meat, so the size of each ban decides how much meat is stuck. [3]

After a 2024 case in Rio Grande do Sul, the state next door, China kept its ban on that state until January 2026. [3]

Also seen in Biotech.

When a germ turns up somewhere new, the first cost is a closed door.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed a rule on Wednesday that would make every state move food-aid cards to chips within two years of a final rule. [4]

The cards carry SNAP, the US food-aid programme, and still use a magnetic stripe that thieves can copy with a device hidden in a card reader. [4]

About $600 million was stolen from SNAP households this way in 2025. [4] Eight states already use chip cards. [4]

The rule puts an upfront cost of $283 million on states, the US government, households and businesses, and states now pay 75% of SNAP's running costs. [4]

The Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group, called it an unfunded mandate. [4]

Also seen in Mind & body and Space.

The US government is handing states and local groups less money, or money that comes with conditions attached.

14,000 fewer people in West Virginia, 4,000 of them children, get SNAP food aid than when a US budget law passed in July 2025, Civil Eats reports. [5]

Across the US, more than 5 million people left SNAP between July 2025 and June 2026, a 17-year low, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research group. [5]

Caseworkers blame stricter work rules and more paperwork. [5] A church pantry in Sandyville saw demand double when SNAP payments were delayed during last autumn's US government shutdown. [7][8]

In an NBC News survey of 90 big food banks, 75% saw more demand and 80% got less food from the USDA. [5]

Farmers lost a buyer too: Tim and Rebecca Cooper were left with a half-million-dollar crop when the USDA cancelled a programme paying food banks to buy local food. [6]

Kroger, the biggest US supermarket chain that sells only groceries, said on Tuesday it will spend $5 billion on lower prices and simpler deals by 2029. [9]

Its store sales grew just 0.2% last quarter, against 3.4% a year earlier. [9]

Its chief executive, Greg Foran, said the deals had become so complicated that shoppers stopped seeing Kroger as cheap. [9]

In stores that cut prices a year ago, sales rose 2.3 percentage points. [9]

Kroger, which has about 2,700 stores in 35 states, says it is already cutting prices on thousands of items. [9]

It is aiming for about 3% sales growth in 2029, partly by getting shoppers to buy more items. [9]

Sales can grow through higher prices or through more items sold, and once shoppers stop paying more, firms cut prices to sell more.

So a food firm that wants to grow has to lower prices or offer new things, to get more items into baskets.

Millions of those small choices, made in different shops for different reasons, add up to a number no single shopper ever sees.

Abbott, a US maker of medical devices, tests and baby formula, said on Wednesday it will turn its nutrition business into a separate company. [10]

The business sells about $8.5 billion a year of products such as Similac baby formula, Ensure and Pedialyte. [10]

It has faced lawsuits since a 2022 baby formula recall that helped cause a US shortage. [10] Abbott agreed in September to pay $385 million to settle US government claims. [10]

The split is due by the end of 2027. [10]

Abbott keeps its faster-growing devices, tests and medicines, about $42 billion of sales. [10]

Analysts said the nutrition arm earns lower margins than the rest of Abbott and still carries baby formula lawsuits. [10]

Virginia's health department has counted 55 people sick with Salmonella linked to oysters, in 19 US states. [11]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US national health agency, still lists 27 people in 12 states. [11]

The oysters came from Virginia's Little Wicomico River and were recalled for harvests from 18 September to 8 October. [11]

Publix, a supermarket chain, sold them as James River Oysters until 14 October, five days after the recall. [11]

The CDC says it takes three to four weeks for a patient's sample to be matched to an outbreak, so official counts run behind. [11]

It estimates that 29 cases go undetected for every confirmed case of Salmonella. [11]

Staff of the US House and Senate farm committees are preparing to negotiate a final farm bill, the big law covering farm programmes and SNAP, when the US Congress returns on 9 November. [12]

One fight is over MCOOL, a rule that would make beef carry a label naming the country it came from. [12]

The US Senate's bill includes it and the House's bill does not. [12]

The US dropped such labels in 2015 after the World Trade Organization, which writes trade rules, sided with Canada and Mexico. [12]

R-CALF USA, a group for independent ranchers, says shoppers deserve to know where their beef comes from. [12]

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association says the old labels raised beef prices and brought tariffs on US farmers. [12]

Dairy Cares, a group of California dairy organisations, sued the state's water board in a Tulare County court on Monday. [13]

In September the board ordered dairies to limit the nitrogen from manure that reaches groundwater, where nitrate pollutes household wells in the Central Valley. [13]

Existing dairies get up to 35 years to meet the final limits, but dairies that expand must meet them within five years. [13] The final limits have not been set yet. [13]

The dairies say no farm may be able to meet limits that nobody knows yet. [13] The board's chair said nitrate is still in household drinking water wells. [13]

Jerry and Valerie Bingham, who farm 1,000 acres near Blackfoot, Idaho, are suing the state's water department. [14]

In 2025 it ordered every groundwater user in the Eastern Snake River Basin with a water right newer than 1900 to stop pumping unless they joined a plan to use less. [14]

The Binghams' right dates from 1950, and their water was shut off in April. [14] The state turned down five of their plans, one of them offering a 40% cut. [14]

Idaho shares water by the age of each right, first in time, first in right, so in a drought newer users lose water first. [14]

A similar case from Washington state, over a $260,000 fine, is waiting for that state's Supreme Court. [14]

Danone, the French maker of Oikos yogurt, will send waste from its biggest US yogurt factory, in Minster, Ohio, to a new $40 million plant. [15]

PurposeEnergy, which builds such plants, will turn up to 250,000 gallons of wastewater a day into biogas, a fuel that microbes make from waste. [15]

The gas will replace some of the natural gas in the factory's boiler. [15] The plant is due to open next spring. [15]

Danone is expanding the Minster factory because demand for high-protein yogurt is surging. [15] The new plant also strips extra nutrients from the wastewater before it reaches the town's sewage works. [15]

Allplants, a British maker of frozen plant-based meals, has been sold to Fleury Michon, a French maker of ham, ready meals and surimi. [16]

Allplants went into administration, a form of bankruptcy, in 2024 and cut 65 jobs. [16]

Ella Mills, founder of the Deliciously Ella brand, and her husband bought it then, while its recipes went separately to Grubby, a recipe-kit firm. [16]

The Mills family said it will now focus on soup-making, distribution and media. [16]

Several plant-based meat firms have folded or been rescued by bigger food companies after a boom in new start-ups. [16]

Brevel, an Israeli start-up, and The Wave Group, an Indian conglomerate, will build a 300,000-litre plant in Uttar Pradesh to grow chlorella, a protein-rich alga. [17]

Brevel feeds the alga sugar and also shines LED light on it, a mix it calls illuminated fermentation. [17]

The first $15 million phase will hold 100,000 litres and use waste from the Wave Group's sugar mill next door as feed. [17] Full production is due in 18 months. [17]

Brevel says the mill's by-products cut its costs. [17] CBC Group, Israel's largest drinks company, plans products using Brevel's ingredient in mid-2027. [17]

Carbon Robotics, a Seattle company whose machines kill weeds with lasers, has laid off an undisclosed number of staff. [18]

It blamed broader economic conditions and said it now has 275 employees. [18]

A former worker wrote online that the firm hired fast and let some people go weeks after they started. [18]

The company passed $100 million in yearly sales in the year to March 2026. [18]

Its machines are sold on saving farmers labour and weedkiller, and banks now lease them to farmers by the month. [18]

Delvano, a Belgian maker of crop sprayers founded in 1966, was declared bankrupt in September. [19] Poor harvests in Europe cut its business, Agriland reports. [19]

More than 700 lots, from sprayers and spare parts to factory tools, will be sold in online auctions from 31 October to 10 November. [19]

They include an unused 2026 sprayer with a 7,000-litre tank. [19]

When harvests are poor, farmers spend less on machines, and the firms that build them lose sales. [19] Delvano had been run by three generations of one family. [19]

Kubota North America, the US arm of the tractor maker, is adding its low-built M5L tractor to a driverless trial with Agtonomy, a software company. [20]

The tractor fits under orchard and nut trees, and will spray, mow and loosen soil with no one in the seat. [20]

Agtonomy's chief executive, Tim Bucher, who grows specialty crops himself, said orchards often lack skilled workers when a job must be done. [20]

The software is built to fit the diesel tractors farms already own, so growers do not need a new machine to try it. [20]

More than 1,000 volunteers in Des Moines, Iowa, packed 990,864 meals of rice, soy and dried vegetables in one hour on Tuesday. [21]

A Guinness World Records judge confirmed it, nearly doubling the old record of 530,064. [21]

It closed the first day of the Borlaug Dialogue, a yearly food meeting run by the World Food Prize Foundation. [21]

At the opening, the actor Martin Sheen called for USAID, the US aid agency shut in 2025, to be brought back. [22]

Half the meals stay in Iowa and half go abroad, enough to feed about 2,037 children for a year, organisers say. [21]

Sheen said USAID's work had reached hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries. [22]

Full Circle Biotech, a company, ranked 43 countries on 16 October by how well they could keep protein foods affordable if farming, trade or supplies were disrupted. [23]

Canada came first with 82.8 points, then Argentina, then the US. [23] Thirty-two of the 43, including the UK, China, India and Japan, were rated exposed or worse. [23]

It said even the US relies on a few beef processors and a single phosphorus producer. [23]

Most countries rely on feed and fertiliser from abroad, which is why the report points to this year's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where about a third of seaborne fertiliser passes. [23]

NielsenIQ, a shopping-data firm, studied more than 40,000 US grocery products for the International Food Information Council, which paid for the work. [24]

Ultra-processed foods, made with additives such as flavourings, emulsifiers or sweeteners, were about three-quarters of food and drink sales. [24]

Some scored as high on nutrients as less-processed foods in the same aisle. [24] 837 ultra-processed cereals beat the cereal average, against 329 less-processed ones. [24]

Large studies link eating more ultra-processed food to worse health. [24] This one measured something different: what is in each product, not what happens to the people who eat them. [24]

Nitrate in some Nebraska wells keeps rising years after farmers changed how they use fertiliser. [25]

Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln won two grants worth more than $1 million to find out why. [25]

They think leftover nitrogen binds into soil far below the roots and turns back into nitrate years later. [25]

The Nebraska Corn Board, paid from a levy on corn sales, is funding a test to clean it out before it reaches the water. [25]

About 80% of Nebraskans drink groundwater pumped from under farmland. [25] The lead researcher, Arindam Malakar, said cleaning nitrate out once it is in a well costs more. [25]

Researchers at Penn State University built AgentXtract, an AI system that pulls measured data out of food science papers and checks it. [26]

It gathered more than 4,000 data records in about 30 minutes, a job that could take a researcher six months or longer. [26]

The team tested how accurate, fast and cheap 10 AI models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic were. [26] Anthropic's AI for Science programme helped pay for the work. [26]

Food engineers can ask the database a question, such as a potato's electrical properties, and get an answer with its sources. [26]

About 70,000 people are expected at the National FFA Convention in Indianapolis from 21 to 24 October. [27] FFA is a US school farming club with more than a million members. [29]

It refused exhibition space to the Fellowship of Christian Farmers International, saying a federally chartered school group cannot host religious stands. [28]

A conservative radio host called the decision woke, and in February three Republican members of the US Congress had questioned FFA's diversity work. [28][29]

FFA says it turns away political and religious groups alike, and that there is no appeal. [28] The convention will award 5,816 American FFA Degrees, its highest honour. [27]

The EU's Deforestation Regulation takes effect on 30 December and also covers Northern Ireland. [30] It requires soya imports to be shown not to come from land where forest was cleared. [30]

Buyers have stocked up on South American soya before the deadline, which pushed prices up, Farmers Weekly reports. [30]

A feed supplier says a two-tier market is forming, keeping forest-free soya from Europe apart from South American soya. [30]

Livestock farmers in Northern Ireland buy soya for feed, and the rest of Great Britain is likely to get similar rules in 2027. [30]

High-protein soya meal still fell 9 pounds a tonne in a week, to 405 pounds on 21 October. [30]

About 100 tractors spelled out Axe the Tax in a field near Newbury, England, on Tuesday. [31]

Farmers and Conservative politicians want the new chancellor, John Healey, to scrap inheritance tax on farms in his first Budget, on 28 October. [31][32]

The UK government raised the tax-free amount from 1 million to 2.5 million pounds. [31] It says about 85% of estates claiming farm relief this year will pay no extra tax. [31]

A Newbury farmer said his farm makes about 10,000 pounds profit a year, so paying the tax would mean selling land. [31]

In a survey of 700 members of the CLA, a group for rural landowners and businesses, 90% had paused or cancelled investment. [31]

Equal Ground, a rural policy group, warned that UK plans to let regions keep more of the money they raise could leave the countryside behind. [32]

From 2027 regional authorities would keep more local business rates, and from 2028 a share of income tax. [32] Places with fewer people and businesses raise less money. [32]

The group wants rural needs checked in every regional plan, and the Budget on 28 October is expected to set out the funding. [32]

Rural England covers 85% of the country and is home to 9.7 million people. [32] Fuel-poor rural homes face an average shortfall of 824 pounds, against 311 pounds in towns. [32]

NFU Cymru, the Welsh farmers' union, asked the Welsh government on Tuesday to adjust its Sustainable Farming Scheme, the country's farm payments, to help dairy farmers. [33]

Milk prices have risen each month this year, but input costs remain high. [33]

A dry summer forced many farms to start using their winter feed early. [33]

Martin Griffiths of the union's dairy board said some farmers are selling milk for less than it costs to produce. [33]

The union says Welsh dairy is worth 929 million pounds a year. [33]

Also seen in Finance, Money, Climate and World.

Attacks around the Gulf have pushed oil past $110 a barrel and made shipping it far dearer.

The National Sheep Association (NSA), which speaks for UK sheep farmers, is pushing back against nature schemes that take sheep off hills to restore peat bogs and plant woods. [34]

It says hills left ungrazed fill up with woody plants that can fuel wildfires. [34]

The NSA brought farmers, a fire service and Rewilding Britain, a nature group, together to discuss it. [34] Rewilding Britain said both sides want hills that resist wildfires. [34]

The NSA says fewer sheep also means less work for abattoirs, markets and shepherds. [34]

The Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI), Northern Ireland's farm science body, forecasts a high risk of liver fluke in cattle and sheep this winter. [35]

Liver fluke is a parasitic worm that grows inside snails on wet ground before infecting animals. [35]

Northern Ireland's summer was about 9% warmer and 8% wetter than usual, which suits the snails. [35] The sudden form of the disease often kills sheep. [35]

Fluke can cut a dairy cow's milk by 5-15%. [35] The only drug that kills young flukes is working less well on some farms that have used it for years. [35]