Great article that shows how food production is globalizing. It almost reads like a chapter out of Friedman's "The World is Flat." Just as Dell and WalMart are making markets and pulling parts and goods from all over the world, Sara Lee is doing the same. What makes the food import business interesting is that the government doesn't have the span to regulate all the imports, the onus is on the company, and they know it. Every once in awhile, they are going to slip up, but their reputation is at stake. If Sara Lee gets it wrong much more than once, people will stop buying their products.
I like how this single article give so much credence to ideas of Friedman, Barnett, and Andy Kessler (Hedge fund guy). The markets will police themselves and scale to integrate that which is cheapest, money just sloshing its way around the globe.
What trade commission figures show is that ingredients are streaming in from more than 100 countries, including China, India, the Philippines and countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In some cases, consumer demand for more ethnic foods in the United States is pushing companies to import harder-to-find foods from exotic locales, but in other cases the phenomenon is simply a function of the way modern processed foods are assembled.
