08/22/08 Bees & Ice Cream

Bees & Ice Cream. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. It took me a while to make the connection but when you really think about it the honey bee is directly responsible for a great deal of what we eat and that includes ice cream. Josh Gellert is the Brand Manager for Haagen-Dazs ice cream. GELLERT: So in Haagen-Dazs we use all natural ingredients in our ice cream and similar it sound like the discussions and conversations you guys are all having, we start having those similar conversations with our suppliers. The folks that supply our almonds or our strawberries and we started to learn about what's happening with honeybees and this is a problem that impacts over 40% of Haagen-Dazs flavors. All those flavors rely on the honeybee. Gellert says that after looking at the issue it was really a much larger picture. GELLERT: The more we learned about honeybees we knew we had to help and we knew it was a bigger issue than just Haagen-Dazs. Yes it is 40% of our flavors but it's 1 out of every 3 bites we all as human beings eat today. Now there is a sobering fact. I'll repeat that. 1 out of every 3 bites we take is attributable to the honeybee. GELLERT: The honeybees are in some ways the unsung heroes of our food supply so once we learned they were in trouble we had to launch a campaign which we call Haagen-Dazs Love Honeybee campaign. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.