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Who doesnt love a little cinnamon sprinkled on their toast or oatmeal? Unfortunately, lovers of the spice now have more things to worry about. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expanded its list of ground cinnamon products to avoid over fears that they could contain elevated levels of lead. Heres what you need to know about the latest cinnamon products the FDA is warning consumers to avoid. Whats happened? On October 10, the FDA updated its ongoing list of ground cinnamon products that consumers should avoid due to fears that the products may contain elevated levels of lead, which could be harmful. The most recent updates to the list of products are just the latest additions to a list that the agency originally published in July 2024. Since then, the FDA has added additional products to the list five timestwo of those times being very recently, on October 8 and October 10. Upon publishing its original notice in 2024, the agency said that it had determined that the ground cinnamon products listed in the table below contain elevated levels of lead and that exposure to these products may be unsafe. These determinations were made after product testing by state programs that the FDA itself later confirmed. As a result of the findings, the FDA recommended that the firms involved should voluntarily recall the productsthe list of which has consistently grown. What cinnamon products should I avoid? As of the time of this writing, the FDA lists 16 different cinnamon products consumers should avoid due to fears of elevated levels of lead. Those products include: DistributorRetailer(s)Lot Code(s)Brand Name(s)Lead Concentration (ppm)Singh Trading Inc. DBA Roshni FoodsNone listedUPC code: 6251136 034139Best by date: BESTBY 020925Roshni2.268Haitai Inc. USANone listedUPC code: 6251136 034139Best by date: BESTBY 020925HAETAE4.60EUREKA INC. U.S.A.Recall AnnouncementDistributed to grocery stores in California and Michigan from 08/24/2024 to 10/6/2025Batch No.: 06 B:02 UPC code: 6251136 034139 Best by date: May 2026Durra2.44SLR Food Distribution, Inc Recall AnnouncementDistributed to retailers located (New Jersey, New York, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Ohio) between 02/15/2024 and 06/28/2025UPC code: 0 688474 302853Wise Wife2.49Spicy World of USATAJ SUPERMARKETAF-CINP/822 Best by date: Best Before: July 2025Jiva Organics2.29IHA Beverage, Commerce, CA IHA Beverage Issues a Voluntary Recall of Super Cinnamon Powder 4oz Because of Lead ContaminationAsian Supermarket, Little Rock, ARNone listedSuper Brand7.68 6.60Sands Impex Inc. Dba Asli Fine Foods Woodbridge, IL Asli Fine Foods . Recalls Asli Cinnamon Powder 7 oz Because of Possible Health RiskA&Y Global Market Columbia, MODDDLUS (Missouri)Asli2.32El Chilar Apopka, FL El Chilar HF, LLC. Expands Recall of El Chilar Ground Cinnamon Due to Elevated Levels of LeadEl Torito MarketD181EX0624 (Maryland) E054EX0225 (Maryland)El Chilar3.75 7.01Moran Foods, LLC Saint Ann, MO Colonna Brothers, Inc. Issues an Updated Voluntary Recall for Marcum & Supreme Tradition Ground Cinnamon Because of Possible Health RiskSave-A-Lot Food Stores, Ltd.BEST BY: 12/05/25 12 D8 (Missouri) BEST BY: 12/05/25 12 D11 (Virginia)Marcum2.22 2.14Raja Foods LLC Skokie, ILPatel BrothersBatch No.: KX28223, Best Before October 2026 (Connecticut)SWAD2.89Greenbrier International, Inc. Chesapeake, VA Colonna Brothers, Inc. Issues an Updated Voluntary Recall for Marcum & Supreme Tradition Ground Cinnamon Because of Possible Health RiskDollar Tree10A11, BEST BY: 10/06/25 (California)Supreme Tradition2.37MAMTAKIM, Inc., Elizabeth, NJ (importer)EurogroceryExp and Lot: 08 2024 L1803231 (Connecticut)Compania Indillor Orientale2.23ALB-USA Enterprises Inc., Bronx, NY ALB-USA Enterprises Recalls ALB Flavor Ground Cinnamon Because of Possible Health RiskEurogroceryBest Before:30/08/2025 – LA02 (Connecticut)ALB Flavor3.93Advance Food International, Inc Advance Food International Inc. Recalls Shahzada Brand Cinnamon Powder 7oz Because of Possible Health RiskPremium SupermarketNone (New York)Shahzada2.03American Spices LLC, NY American Spices LLC. Recalls Spice Class Ground Cinnamon Because of Possible Health RiskFish WorldBest by: 12/2026 (New York)Spice Class2.04La Frontera ImportsFrutas Y Abarrotes Mexico, Inc.None (New York)La Frontera2.66 Images of the products can be found on the FDAs notice here. Has anyone been harmed by consuming the designated products? As of the time of this writing, no one is ye known to have been harmed by consuming the listed products, the FDA says. However, it can take months or years to see the negative health effects of elevated levels of lead in the body. Long-term exposure (months to years) to elevated levels of lead in the diet could contribute to adverse health effects, particularly for the portion of the population that may already have elevated blood lead levels from other exposures to lead, the agency warns in its notice. The FDA goes on to explain that the adverse health effects of consuming lead-contaminated food vary depending on a number of factors, including the age of the person, the volume and frequency of lead exposure, and more. The very young are particularly vulnerable to the potential harmful effects from lead exposure because of their smaller body sizes and rapid metabolism and growth, the agency warns. High levels of exposure to lead in utero, infancy, and early childhood can lead to neurological effects such as learning disabilities, behavior difficulties, and lowered IQ. What are the consequences of lead exposure? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), exposure to lead in children can result in adverse effects, including: Damage to the brain and nervous system Slowed growth and development Learning and behavior problems Hearing and speech problems The CDC says this can lead to lower IQ, a decreased attention span ability, and underperformance in educational environments. Lead exposure in children is often difficult to see, the agency notes. Most children have no obvious immediate symptoms. If parents believe their children have been exposed to lead, they should talk to their child’s healthcare provider. What should I do if I have the listed cinnamon products? Ground cinnamon products last for years, which means consumers may have the products in their kitchen pantries and on their shelves, and may even have forgotten about themand so people may not use the products until far in the future when they suddenly need the spice for cooking or baking. But the FDA is warning consumers to check their homes now and discard any of the products on the list, warning that consumers should not eat, sell, or serve ground cinnamon products the agency has identified as potentially having elevated levels of lead.
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Every day another industry leader proclaims that everything will change with AI. While there is no question AI is the most transformative tech shift since the industrial revolution, all the hype means leaders lack real answers about how those changes will roll out or improve critical decisions that will impact the future of their business. As the CEO of a technology company that has invested over $2 billion in evolving our cloud and managed services platform over the past 14 years, I have seen firsthand how foundational innovation sets the stage for transformational leaps. Two years ago, we recognized that AI had matured from future potential to strategic imperativeprompting a $100M investment while continuing to evolve our existing platform. Soon we will launch the next generation of our platform with AI fully integrated, putting our customers in a winning position while giving our internal teams the early-adopter advantage to evaluate vendor solutions and empower employees to harness AIs full potential. Our team sees AI following the 80/20 rule: 80% of jobs will change 20%, and 20% of jobs will change 80%. Here are four questions we continue to ask as we progress on our AI journey, for our customers and internally: 1. How are we encouraging AI literacy across the entire organization? AI is moving too fast to guarantee ROI; but it is too transformative to gatekeep it from employees. You will never find out how AI can help your teams unless you enable innovation that comes from all levels in the organization. The best way to encourage that is by giving tools to everyone. In our case we added Microsoft CoPilot to our existing contract as soon as it was released to encourage team members to use AI in their daily work while running AI literacy and education programs across the company. 2. What is the AI innovation process? As a leader, you want to operationalize curiosity and let every employee explore, test, and learn what is possible with AI. The promise of AI is that a non-coder can build an app, and it is true. Your most innovative team members will build their apps for their business problem and go fastand if you offer a little help, these innovators will go faster. In the last six months we have seen 725 exploratory agents created by employees experimenting with CoPilot. Of those, 40 agents have been selected to scale and are being used routinely across teams. Meanwhile, IT continues to offer technical and moral support to the self-starters. The most important part of this process is understanding these employee-led innovations and applying them to the broader organization. In our case, promising ideas are funneled through a formal review process to assess their potential for enterprise-wide scalabilityfor instance, a services-built app was expanded with enterprise support to also support sales. When a use case requires IT or development resources, the innovator helps define the use case and provide an ROI, after which the AI steering committee prioritizes initiatives based on their potential impact. This ensures the most valuable ideas move forward efficiently while the entire organization learns. 3. What is the A2A and MCP story? As a CEO you need to learn the key terms A2A and MCP and push for these standards to avoid your teams building silos of technology that become obsolete as they cannot work with other systemsthe bane of every enterprise back office. A2A is agent to agent; think of it as APIs for agentic. One vendors agent speaks to another vendors agent, which allows the passing of context so that an enterprise workflow can succeed. Vendors will resist this as they try to monopolize your spend. MCP is model context protocol. MCP is a server that sits in front of a data repository and summarizes the context for agents. This reduces the need for agents to access your datawhich in many cases they do not need; they only need the context of a situation to decide what action to take. This will keep your teams from getting caught in a quagmire of creating data silos while reducing your need for data warehouses. 4. When will we see the ROI? In the rigid world of IT timelines and budgets, we would all like to see ROI immediately. But remember the greatest innovations and paybacks often come from learning and failure. After all, when asked about all the missteps on his way to create the electric light, Edison famously answered: I have not failed. Ive just found 10,000 ways that wont work. Artificial intelligence is going to change the world and everything that we do. Failure to invest in AI will put your entire business at risk, and a short-term focus on ROI is myopic. Our culture is about better, better, never best, where we celebrate success and learn from failure. This approach has enabled our product teams to evolve our platform at the right time for artificial intelligence, and for our IT organization to draft on those learnings while creating an environment where employees can innovate and keep Calix and our customers as leaders of the AI opportunity.
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Theres no shortage of challenges facing employers and the U.S. workforce. From economic concerns to the impact of AI, both workers and organizational leaders are navigating big changes. One trend deserves particular attention: working mothers are reevaluating their place in the workforce. As reported by the Washington Post, the share of mothers aged 25 to 44 with young children who are in the workforce is on the decline, reaching its lowest level in more than three years. This shift has direct implications for recruiting, retention, and overall market competitiveness. But it also opens the door for leaders to make a meaningful difference for their employees. Understanding the pressures working mothers face Research by Harris Poll and KinderCare confirms this same reality: Working parents are balancing tremendous responsibilities at home and at work. As a working mother myself, I know firsthand how real these pressures feel. At the heart of the challenge is supportor too often, the lack of it. Our 2025 Parent Confidence Index, a survey of 2,000 U.S. parents with children under age 12 conducted with the Harris Poll, found that working parents are especially impacted by back-to-office mandates. Nearly three-quarters of parents are now working in-office full-time or in hybrid roles, and 60% say this has impacted their child care needs. Many would still prefer remote arrangements: 40% said all remote is their ideal, and nearly half felt pressured to return to the office. As employers continue to evolve their workplace policies, what working parents want from employers is clear. More than three-quarters believe employers should offset the cost of child care. Parents told us that they specifically want subsidized, on-demand, and on-site child care options, depending on their working scenario. Yet theres often a perception gap. While nearly half of all employees say they want child care benefits, only a third of chief HR officers (CHROs) believe their workforce needs them. And a striking 60% of employees say theyd rather have child care subsidies than a raise. Child care isnt just a nice-to-have when nearly three-quarters of parents say it would be impossible to do their job without reliable, high-quality care. Among those who already have benefits, 90% report that quality child care gives them peace of mind to perform well at work. Employers can be a part of the solution While many parents still say finding child care feels challenging, employers are uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. Child care benefits dont just support familiesthey strengthen business outcomes: Employee performance: Nearly 60% of parents say unreliable child care has hurt workplace performance. Retention: More than half would stay at a job because of child care benefits, and one-third or more would switch to get them. Reputation: More than 80% of employees believe how a company supports parents reflects how it cares for employees overall. Employers who lead here will be seen as family-oriented, caring, empathetic, and forward-thinking. A practical path forward The good news is that solutions are accessible and effective. Child care programs are not difficult or cost-prohibitive to implement, and their return on investment is significant when compared with the high cost of turnover (currently estimated at 50% to 200% of the employees annual salary). For example, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health partnered with KinderCare to assess how family care challenges affected their workforce. The survey revealed a clear ROI opportunity: Access to reliable child care would significantly reduce absenteeism, a critical issue in healthcare. The straightforward solution was to open an on-site child care center. KinderCare helped bring that vision to life, which continues to thrive, providing essential support to their working parents. Talent isnt disposable. It is the organizations margin of difference. Ultimately, the message for C-suite and talent leaders is simple: listen. More than 80% of employees who are parents believe that how a company supports its working parents reflects how it cares for its employees overall. Employees are telling us what matters mostsupporting the integration of home and work. By developing programs that speak directly to workforce realities, organizations strengthen retention, productivity, and competitive position.
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E-Commerce
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