Taiwanese restaurants and hotel chains said that they are under pressure to raise prices to reflect expected increases in the price of locally produced pork amid health concerns about pork containing traces of ractopamine.
However, there are also concerns that doing so could scare away potential customers.
A policy allowing imports of US pork containing the animal feed additive came into effect on Friday. Local producers are not allowed to use ractopamine.
Photo: CNA
Several major restaurant chains in Taiwan, such as Wowprime Corp (王品), Tai Tong Food & Beverage Group (TTFB, 瓦城泰統集團), Hi-Lai Foods Co (漢來美食), Bafang Yunji International Co (八方雲集) and Tofu Restaurant Co (豆府), as well as Formosa International Hotels Corp (晶華國際酒店集團) and LDC Hotels & Resorts Group (雲朗觀光集團), said they are using only pork produced in Taiwan or pork from countries that do not use ractopamine.
For example, Bafang Yunji, which operates 1,000 dumpling restaurants across Taiwan, said that it only uses Taiwanese pork at its outlets in central and southern Taiwan.
Its northern Taiwan stores mainly use locally produced pork, but have imported a “small amount” of ractopamine-free pork from Denmark.
Meanwhile, Wowprime, which operates 21 restaurant brands with a total of 280 stores nationwide, said that most of its pork is from Taiwan, although it has also imported some from Denmark, as well as lard from Japan.
TTFB said that none of its restaurants use US pork products and clearly label the country of origin in accordance with government regulations.
However, several restaurant and hotel chain operators said they might be forced to raise their prices soon, as many Taiwanese pork vendors are planning to raise their prices because the new policy is expected to boost demand for locally produced pork.
A restaurant chain operator, who asked to remain anonymous, said that although most imported pork does not contain ractopamine, almost all restaurants believe the only way to convince customers of the safety of their products is to use only Taiwanese pork.
This would lead to significantly higher domestic pork prices and increase restaurants’ costs, but they are reluctant to increase prices as that would affect their businesses, the operator said.
“We are caught in a dilemma,” they added.
Another senior manager at a restaurant chain said that despite the central government’s policy, many local governments continue to ban ractopamine.
The manager, who also asked to remain anonymous, called on the government to come up with a single nationwide standard regarding the use of ractopamine so that restaurant operators would have clear guidelines to follow.
Ractopamine is banned in the EU and China because of concerns over safety for both animals and humans. The US allows the use of ractopamine, and had said that Taiwan’s zero-tolerance policy impeded trade.
Since the new policy was announced on Aug. 28, a number of local governments have said that they would continue to ban ractopamine in pork.
However, the Cabinet has said that local government bans have no validity.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS