Sugar factories prep for high harvest expectations | Farm Ranch | Chemical Seasoning Pouch Packing Machine

Current First Person editor Catherine Dawson March loved Dr. Paula Williams’s 2016 piece about the generosity of her patients. This year, she’s already received mojito-flavoured body foam, a pen on a sparkly string and 300 Ethiopian sugar cookies in a carrier bag.

Dumping the bag of licorice onto my desk, I began to dig around, pushing aside a Super Salmiakki lollipop, a packet of Dracula Piller (salmiakki with a creepy vampire mascot), a box of peppered salmiakki pellets (actually called Sisu!), before finally extracting what I was looking for. And what do you know? With the foreknowledge of what was coming, it didn’t taste all that bad. I mean, certainly no worse than any of the rest.

The median restaurant startup cost was $375,000. This equates to a median cost of $113 per square foot, or $3,586 per seat. Many factors affected cost including remodel vs. new construction, free standing building vs. tenant space, and whether the restaurant was full service, limited service, bar or tavern, catering business, or takeout and delivery.

This year’s predictions came from Whole Foods Market’s culinary experts and industry leaders who source items and lead trend-spotting initiatives across the retailer’s more than 490 stores. The in-house specialists combine their expertise from all departments including cheese, specialty, grocery, meat, seafood, prepared foods, produce and body care, when preparing the forward-looking trends report.

It smelled strongly of cocoa and toasted almonds on the other side of the doors. Iwai assured me that this scent changed daily, often more than once a day, according to what was being made. He also warned me not to run, because I might slip in my new shoes. Iwai studied microbiology at university and has been working for Nestlé since 2001; he has managed the Kasumigaura factory for the last three years. Wafers were the beginning of the line, the beginning of every single Kit Kat.

“It really put everything in perspective,” Thornburrow says. She found out that cleaning all the plastic bins regularly is an essential, yet time-consuming and finnicky procedure, and that food stored in bins would need to be sold within a week or discarded.

Fazer is also the largest producer of licorice in the country. In 1927, the company bought a British-Finnish biscuit-and-licorice company and released its signature line of sweet licorice the following year. The wrapper design featured a racist “golliwog” caricature, the British equivalent of a Sambo doll, which, depressingly, was not uncommon in itself — you can find historic examples of noxious candy packaging throughout the world — but which Fazer failed to jettison until 2007, in part under pressure from the European Union. (Why the company took so long to act is a “good and hard question,” a Fazer spokeswoman, Liisa Eerola, told me in an email. “Culturally, Finland was quite isolated for a long time. ... Looking back, it is easy to say that we moved far too late.”) Fazer has been making salmiakki since 1938, and its portfolio of salty offerings now includes products like Super Salmiakki, Pantteri (“Panther”) and Tyrkisk Peber (“Turkish Pepper”), so spicy that it’s ranked like hot sauce, with a flaming-star rating system.

Soaker pads in the Blue Seawell tray’s 12 wells not only remove purge, they provide antimicrobial protection that protects against fishy odors for 10 days, doubling the scallops’ shelf life. Atlantic Capes coupled the packaging solution with Maxwell Chase’s tray sealers, which range from manually fed units to automated machines that seal 36-38 trays per minute.

When Jim got too loud, my mother would race out of her salon to scold him, but he had a bomb squad's sense of timing.

Of all the candies in the world, Chupa Chups might have the most famous designer. In 1969, Enric Bernat, the Spanish businessman behind the lollipop brand, asked his friend Salvador Dalí to create the well-known logo. Though it has had some tweaks since then, that daisy-shaped logo — and the fact that it’s placed at the top of the pop — remains, as does the name, which translates to something like ‘‘sucky suck.’’ Since they were first released in the 1950s, the candies have become available in 177 countries and even made it to outer space in 1994, when Russian astronauts brought them to the Mir space station. Today, the best-selling flavors are strawberry and cola, which happen to be two of the original five, along with mint, lemon and orange.

Away from the manger: The Jesus figure in our crèche would not stay put, Bill Bunn writes. And then he lost his head

“We had no choice but to go back to work,” said Mr. Hamoud. “We did the same job as before. Except we were now serving a terrorist group.”