The fast-food industry’s $4.2 billion marketing blitz

 The fast-food industry’s $4.2 billion marketing blitz
The fast-food industry’s $4.2 billion marketing blitz
by Tom Philpott


Last week, I praised fast food, which has probably been around as long as people have lived in cities.
But there's a particular type of fast food that goes back just a half-century, dating to the post-war rise of car-centered cities and suburbs. It relies on regimentation, weird additives, flavor "engineering," super-cheap (but highly subsidized) ingredients, and super-expensive marketing. I won't bore you with why I think this type of fast food sucks; wouldn't want to be labeled a food snob!

But let's talk about that marketing. Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity has just put out an extraordinary report [PDF] on fast-food industry marketing.

Here's the report's headline number: $4.2 billion, which is how much the industry spent marketing its wares in 2010.

To put that amount in perspective, consider the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the USDA's sub-agency that "works to improve the health and well-being of Americans by developing and promoting dietary guidance that links scientific research to the nutrition needs of consumers." Its annual budget? $6.5 million, according to The New York Times reporter Michael Moss.

So $4.2 billion vs. $6.5 million. That means that for every $1 the industry spends haranguing Americans to eat stuff like Burger King's 2,500-calorie Pizza Burger, about a tenth of a penny gets spent urging folks to eat their spinach.

And of course, as Moss' superb recent piece shows, the USDA also openly collaborates with the industry to cajole people to eat more corporate fast food.

A $4.2 billion marketing budget in 2009, a year characterized by a brutal economic slump, is the sign of an extremely profitable industry. Corporate fast food is what is known as a "countercyclical" industry -- it tends to thrive when the economy goes to hell. When money is tight, McDonald's dollar menu looks like a bargain -- and stuff like Domino's now-infamous eight-cheese Wisconsin Pizza seems like a reasonable indulgence.

How well are these companies doing? The stock market gives us a clue. Over the past two years, shares of Yum! Brands (owner of owner of KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Long John Silver's) and McDonald's have both more than doubled. Meanwhile, the overall stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 index of the nation's largest publicly traded companies, has flat-lined. In other words, investors are quite bullish on junk food corporations.

When times are flush, the industry is using its $4.2 billion marketing stash largely to cultivate new generations of customers: i.e., kids. The Rudd report doesn't estimate how much of the fast-food industry's marketing budget is directed at children (a 2006 study estimated a tidy $1.6 billion), but it offers a dizzying array of data to demonstrate the industry's devotion to this dubious cause. Get this

What to make of all of this? To me, it underscores the importance of the National School Lunch Program. School lunches are our society's most concrete, tangible way of transmitting foodways to rising generations. The public-school cafeteria is where we create a public vision of what the food system should be. In short, it's the public contribution to the formation of kids' eating habits. And it is in the cafeteria, I think, where the fast-food industry's marketing efforts could be effectively rebuffed.
Unfortunately, I don't have much good news here, either. Currently, we spend about $11 billion annually on school lunches -- of which two-thirds goes to overhead and labor costs. That leaves about $4 billion to spend on ingredients -- roughly equal to the fast food industry's marketing annual budget. Per child, schools have about 90 cents per day to spend on ingredients.

At those levels of funding, it's no wonder that public-school administrators are increasingly outsourcing cooking to ... the fast-food industry, which knows a thing or two about engineering low-quality ingredients into something people will crave. And guess what? The USDA is cheering them on. Listen several minutes into this boring radio clip, and you'll hear a Domino's exec babbling about how USDA officials are helping the company get its pizza into school cafeterias. And if that doesn't kill you, here's a report about a Connecticut town that has invited McDonald's PR flacks into its public schools to provide nutritional counseling.

There are school districts that are trying to teach kids other visions of what food is. Grist contributor and parent-turned-school-lunch-activist Ed Bruske is writing about the one in Boulder, Colo., right now -- and how it's struggling to balance the budget after tossing the junk food out.

Meanwhile, San Francisco is about to become the first major city to ban chains from providing toys in certain fast-food meals. The measure has aroused scorn -- what will San Francisco ban next? the Times' Freaknomics blog asked. But when cash-strapped parents and school districts are up against $4.2 billion in carefully plotted ways to get kids to beg for fast food, any public effort to fight back seems welcome

from - http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-11-09-the-fast-food-industrys-4.2-billion-marketing-blitz

Sony 3D Blu-ray Fullhd Player Review

Sony 3D Blu-ray Fullhd Player Review
Sony 3D Blu-ray Fullhd Player Review
Written by Thomas Spurlin   
For a long time, Sony’s been struggling with a good problem to have regarding their standalone Blu-ray decks.  It doesn’t matter if their quality strong, the reaction time decent, and the supplemental specifics pleasing to the eye, they always have to combat price-wise against the company’s “flagship” player, the Playstation 3. On most occasions, their standalone decks of a comparable quality (such as the BDP-S560, reviewed here) were, on a good day, the same price as their game-playing iteration, a unit that’s become a reference machine for the likes of The Criterion Collection and others.

However, with the whittled-down cost of Blu-ray technology, they’ve finally been able to nail down a wireless, attractive until with their BDP-S570 that’s a good $50 below the PS3’s $300 list price.  With wireless connectivity on-board, a sleek style makeover, snappy loading timeframes and respectable audiovisual performance, including 24p upscaling for DVDs and support for online stream services such as Netflix, Sony might’ve finally concocted a healthy Blu-ray alternative -- one that easily bests their previous 5-series model.  Yes, it’s 3D ready as well for when the technology’s ready, but that’s just part of the puzzle.

Out of the Box

If a pair of eyes will be looking at the S570 that have seen the thickness and width of other Blu-ray decks, they’ll be taken slightly aback at the compressed size of this high-functioning unit.  It barely sits a foot and a half deep at 17 inches, while offering a bit of a slack-jaw inducing height at 1.81 inches tall. Sure, the likes of Samsung’s ultra thin BD-P4600 are more shocking with their size, but the ability to cram this high-function player into a compact, glossy design impresses to a noteworthy extent.  In comparison, this unit sits roughly a full inch shallower from front to back and about a half an inch shorter than JVC’s XV-BP1, an able-bodied and size-conscious unit on its own.    Gone are the flip-open tray and wonky buttons from the S560, replaced by a front panel that’s sturdy, unwavering, and void of any blue coloring.  But it’d be wise to have a polishing cloth ready if lights are in proximity, as the black glossy finish is prone both to dust pick-up and fingerprints.

To the front, attractive minimalist design takes the helm. The short stature calls for a more edgy motif to make it grab the user’s eye, complimented here by a thin silver trim that rides along a small jetting “shelf” at the bottom that holds very, very small buttons for stopping, playing, pausing, powering down and the rest of the standard functions. These buttons feel almost like thinner, hard Tic-Tacs or another small mint, which are pointed but on the stiff side.  A very soft LED timer arrives on the right-hand side, rendered in delicate but readable blue typography that’s adjustable to even darker levels within the menus. For a little extra ambience and, maybe in some lighting, assistance in seeing the buttons, a thin light strip appears directly in the center of the unit that glows an agreeably tame white color – whose brightness can also be toggled along with the time display. A USB 2.0 port also adorns the right of the panel.

On the rear of the S570, there’s very little to get excited about. We’ve got out standard ports for plug-and-play usage, with the HDMI out taking charge as the preferred connection method. Component RGB jacks are available, along with coaxial and optical outputs to match for audio, as well as a LAN cable port for non-wireless Internet usage. The only nice earmark we’ve got on the rear panel is a port for a USB connection, so the user can connect a storage device to the back without cluttering up the front continuously. It’s worth noting, however, the power cable isn’t a standard A/C output port, instead carrying a permanent connection that cannot be unplugged or replaced. That’s a little frustrating for installation folks and those who’d prefer easier plug-and-play experience, or for those that, say, have a power wiring issue and need to switch out cables.

Remote


Though Sony has implemented a new model of remote between the S560 and the S570, jumping from a RMT-B104A to a RMT-B107A, there’s almost no difference between the two devices. Both are flimsy tack-on designs that work, mind you, and are user friendly – just very inexpensively handled.  The B107A, however, has one key feature that the 104A lacked, and that’s an EJECT button. The “Theater” button has been scooped up and moved to a new location, but other than that it’s the same unit; therefore, the comments annotated in the review for the S560’s remote carry over here.  Essentially, it’s a lighter, flimsier version of Sony’s Playstation 3 Bluetooth remote, carrying the same rotary navigation functions, color-coded buttons, and TV control as before

what is expensive food in china

what is expensive food in china
what is expensive food in china
McDonald’s announced it has raised its prices in all 1,000 of its Chinese restaurants due to the high food inflation. The price hike only pertains to mainland China and does not affect any of its other Asian franchise restaurants.

The Chinese Consumer Price Index rose 4.4% in October, the highest monthly rise in more than two years.
The rise in CPI is primarily due to the high cost of raw food commodities and may spurn China to place a cap on commodity prices.
Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier, said that his cabinet is drafting legislation to curb the excessive price increases.

China may also impose limits and tougher penalties on agricultural futures speculators that drive up the prices of raw materials artificially.
The plans have drawn criticism in China as well as abroad. Some economists have called the measures unnecessary and point out that China has sufficient tools to control rising food prices without having to resort to the drastic measures of capping futures and food prices.
China is expected to raise its benchmark rate this coming Friday by another 25 Bp to battle inflation.
The Consumer Confidence Index in China shows that 76% of the Chinese expect prices to rise over the next year, according to the Chinese statistics bureau.

India’s fast growing economy is not immune to the rise in food prices either. Dairy products alone rose by 21% in 2010 while other non-dairy food prices saw a jump of 14% year-over-year.
While Ben Bernanke may point out that inflationary pressure in the US remains below expectations that may not be the case for much longer. US food producers have hinted on several occasions that a rise in food prices should be expected to pass on the higher production costs to the consumer in order to keep their profit margins healthy.
Inflation seems to rise across the global economy and one local or continental economy cannot consider itself to be immune.
The inflationary wave will move from the East to the West at a rapid pace and unless our monetary policies are adequate we should brace ourselves for the realistic possibility that a Chinese or Indian ripple will become a tsunami when the effect reaches the US.
The US however faces a more crippling effect to battle the food war and that is high unemployment and low spendable income.

One can always opt to eat at McDonald’s in Beijing where a Big Mac meal will only set you back $2.20 versus one in the US where the average price stands at $3.70.

Written by Nick Doms © 2010, all rights reserved

prevent nuclear meltdown in japan

 prevent nuclear meltdown in japan
Snap analysis: Japan may have hours to prevent nuclear meltdown
Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) is racing to cool down the reactor core after a highly unusual "station blackout" -- the total loss of power necessary to keep water circulating through the plant to prevent overheating.
Daiichi Units 1, 2 and 3 reactors shut down automatically at 2:46 p.m. local time due to the earthquake. But about an hour later, the on-site diesel back-up generators also shut, leaving the reactors without alternating current (AC) power.
That caused Tepco to declare an emergency and the government to evacuate thousands of people from near the plant. Such a blackout is "one of the most serious conditions that can affect a nuclear plant," according to experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S. based nuclear watchdog group.
"If all AC power is lost, the options to cool the core are limited," the group warned.
TEPCO also said it has lost ability to control pressure at some of the reactors at its Daini plant nearby.
The reactors at Fukushima can operate without AC power because they are steam-driven and therefore do not require electric pumps, but the reactors do require direct current (DC) power from batteries for its valves and controls to function.
If battery power is depleted before AC power is restored, the plant would stop supplying water to the core and the cooling water level in the reactor core could drop.
RADIATION RELEASE
Officials are now considering releasing some radiation to relieve pressure in the containment at the Daiichi plant and are also considering releasing pressure at Daini

signs that difficulties are mounting. Such a release has only occurred once in U.S. history, at Three Mile Island.
"(It's) a sign that the Japanese are pulling out all the stops they can to prevent this accident from developing into a core melt and also prevent it from causing a breach of the containment (system) from the pressure that is building up inside the core because of excess heat," said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
While the restoration of power through additional generators should allow TEPCO to bring the situation back under control, left unchecked the coolant could boil off within hours. That would cause the core to overheat and damage the fuel, according to nuclear experts familiar with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.

It could take hours more for the metal surrounding the ceramic uranium fuel pellets in the fuel rods to melt, which is what happened at Three Mile Island. That accident essentially frozen the nuclear industry for three decades.
Seven years later the industry suffered another blow after the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded due to an uncontrolled power surge that damaged the reactor core, releasing a radioactive cloud that blanketed Europe.
The metal on the fuel rods would not melt until temperatures far exceed 1,000 degrees F. The ceramic uranium pellets would not melt until temperatures reached about 2,000 degrees F, nuclear experts said.
If it occurred, that would ultimately cause a meltdown, with the core becoming a molten mass that would melt through the steel reactor vessel, releasing a large amount of radioactivity into the containment building that surrounds the vessel, the Union of Concerned Scientists said.
The main purpose of the building -- an air tight steel or reinforced concrete structure with walls between four to eight feet thick -- is to keep radioactivity from being released into the environment.
While there has not been any indication of damage that would undermine the building's ability to contain the pressure and allow radioactivity to leak out, there is a danger that if pressure builds too much then the walls could be breached

Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/121974/20110312/japanese-massive-earthquake-tsunami-nuclear-meltdown.htm#ixzz1Gg1rFHQl
Snap analysis: Japan may have hours to prevent nuclear meltdown
Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) is racing to cool down the reactor core after a highly unusual "station blackout" -- the total loss of power necessary to keep water circulating through the plant to prevent overheating.
Daiichi Units 1, 2 and 3 reactors shut down automatically at 2:46 p.m. local time due to the earthquake. But about an hour later, the on-site diesel back-up generators also shut, leaving the reactors without alternating current (AC) power.
That caused Tepco to declare an emergency and the government to evacuate thousands of people from near the plant. Such a blackout is "one of the most serious conditions that can affect a nuclear plant," according to experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S. based nuclear watchdog group.
"If all AC power is lost, the options to cool the core are limited," the group warned.
TEPCO also said it has lost ability to control pressure at some of the reactors at its Daini plant nearby.
The reactors at Fukushima can operate without AC power because they are steam-driven and therefore do not require electric pumps, but the reactors do require direct current (DC) power from batteries for its valves and controls to function.
If battery power is depleted before AC power is restored, the plant would stop supplying water to the core and the cooling water level in the reactor core could drop.
RADIATION RELEASE
Officials are now considering releasing some radiation to relieve pressure in the containment at the Daiichi plant and are also considering releasing pressure at Daini

signs that difficulties are mounting. Such a release has only occurred once in U.S. history, at Three Mile Island.
"(It's) a sign that the Japanese are pulling out all the stops they can to prevent this accident from developing into a core melt and also prevent it from causing a breach of the containment (system) from the pressure that is building up inside the core because of excess heat," said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
While the restoration of power through additional generators should allow TEPCO to bring the situation back under control, left unchecked the coolant could boil off within hours. That would cause the core to overheat and damage the fuel, according to nuclear experts familiar with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.

It could take hours more for the metal surrounding the ceramic uranium fuel pellets in the fuel rods to melt, which is what happened at Three Mile Island. That accident essentially frozen the nuclear industry for three decades.
Seven years later the industry suffered another blow after the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded due to an uncontrolled power surge that damaged the reactor core, releasing a radioactive cloud that blanketed Europe.
The metal on the fuel rods would not melt until temperatures far exceed 1,000 degrees F. The ceramic uranium pellets would not melt until temperatures reached about 2,000 degrees F, nuclear experts said.
If it occurred, that would ultimately cause a meltdown, with the core becoming a molten mass that would melt through the steel reactor vessel, releasing a large amount of radioactivity into the containment building that surrounds the vessel, the Union of Concerned Scientists said.
The main purpose of the building -- an air tight steel or reinforced concrete structure with walls between four to eight feet thick -- is to keep radioactivity from being released into the environment.
While there has not been any indication of damage that would undermine the building's ability to contain the pressure and allow radioactivity to leak out, there is a danger that if pressure builds too much then the walls could be breached

Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/121974/20110312/japanese-massive-earthquake-tsunami-nuclear-meltdown.htm#ixzz1Gg1rFHQl

Joint Conference on Extreme Weather 2011

Joint Conference on Extreme Weather 2011

The meeting will be held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa a superb location right on the waterfront. The conference begins on Wednesday February 9 with keynote addresses and sessions on Extreme weather and the main climate drivers. At the completion of talks in the evening there will be an icebreaker and opportunity to view posters. On day 2 there will be keynote addresses and sessions on Oceanography and the use of high resolution modelling to understand local weather systems. In the afternoon, busses will leave Te Papa about 4pm to take participants along the rugged south coast of Wellington to Pencarrow Homestead where the conference dinner will be held. Day 3 will have keynote addresses and sessions on Climate change and Disaster planning. Proceedings will end at about 5pm on Friday February 11.

Onsite conference registration will open at 8.00 am on Wednesday February 9, in the Rangimaire rooms, level 3, Te Papa. An Information desk will be staffed during coffee and lunch breaks throughout the conference. Morning and afternoon tea and lunches will all be provided in Te Papa’s Icon room which has access to a pleasant waterfront balcony.

milk industry still recovering from melamine crisis

milk industry still recovering from melamine crisis

Morinaga Milk Industry,A major Japanese food manufacturer has found traces of an industrial chemical in some of its products that were made in China, as a food safety scare centered on tainted milk continued to spread, health officials said Friday.

The news came as Japan added food products from 12 Asian countries and territories with a record of importing milk products from China to a watch list for special inspections.

Japan’s Marudai Food Co pulled its cream buns, meat buns and creamed corn crepes from supermarkets a week ago as the tainted milk scandal in China began to unfold. Its tests have since found traces of the industrial chemical melamine in several of the recalled products, Health and Welfare Ministry official Mina Kojima said.



Japan's third largest dairy company posted [yen] 431.2bn in sales for its 1999 financial year, ending March 1999, for a net profit of [yen] 2.5bn and a current profit of [yen] 8.7bn, up compared with sales of [yen] 418.2bn in 1998, for a [yen] 2.5bn net profit and a current profit of [yen] 7.5bn. Morinaga Milk's main business is dairy products; it posted [yen] 193bn, it holds a 8% share of market milk and which represented 45% of the sales in dairy product business. Sales of condensed milk, dried milk, cheese and butter, represented 20% of the sales, for [yen] 84.8bn. Morinaga Milk ranks second on the yogurt market with a 19% market share ; its sales came to [yen] 55bn in 1998. It also ranks second on the ice cream market, posting sales of [yen] 51.3bn, up 4%. Morinaga Milk leads the coffee creamer market; it sold 7.350 tonnes of its Creap brand which holds a 34% market share. In 1998, Morinaga Milk sold [yen] 520mn worth of baby food for a 2.5% market share, and it ranks third on the infant milk market, where it holds a 26% market share, for a sales volume of 9,000 tonnes. In addition to dairy products, Morinaga is involved in soft drinks, chilled foods, fertilisers, effluent treatment plants, coffee creamer, infant foods, tofu, dairy engineering, farming, pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, cosmetics, and real estate. It exports tofu to 32 countries, and sells tofu with a long shelf life in the United States. Morinaga milk's soft drink sales came to [yen] 33.8bn in 1998, representing 8% of sales. Morinaga milk spent [yen] 10bn biotechnology research laboratory which is to produce drugs for cancer from bifidus bacteria, and to develop other drugs designed to counteract side effects of cancer

Marudai has sold more than 300,000 of the products, most of which are believed to have been consumed, but so far there have been no reports of health problems, she said.

Company executive Masaaki Sugiyama told a news conference that two kinds of cream buns and the crepes had traces of melamine, but the amount was so small that it posed no health threat. He apologized for the company’s failure to prevent the contamination.



The public health department in Takatsuki, a western city where Marudai is headquartered, said its lab tests found one of the cream buns, “Cream Panda,” contained melamine 74 times higher than the tolerable daily intake level set by the European Food Safety Agency.

But public health official Mami Matsumoto said an average adult would need to eat 33 crepes or 17 panda buns every day to risk being sickened.

“Nobody eats so many of them. We believe the risk is negligible,” Matsumoto said.

The ministry said earlier Friday that it had suspended imports of milk and milk products from China, and had singled out products from 12 other countries and territories for close inspection. The move was meant to prevent tainted products from entering the country, ministry official Yoshiya Nishimura said. This study has three main objectives: (i) to quantify the impacts of milk and feed price changes on the primary milk supply in the U.S.;Many of the more than 60,000 dairy farms in the United States have been cutting costs, selling off their cows, or leaving the dairy business altogether as milk prices plummet 35 percent in just the past two months while dairy farm operating costs remain uncomfortably high.



Some farms are losing $200 per head every month.

"We've dealt with 18 percent interest. We've dealt with farm recession. We've dealt with droughts and floods and this is by far the worst economic situation we have ever dealt with in our years of farming," said Kooistra, who has run Kooistra Farms in Woodstock, Illinois, with her husband since 1980.

(ii) to examine the impacts of technological changes on the price responsiveness of supply and specific herd characteristics; and (iii) to generate dynamic long-run forecasts of the milk supply response to price changes and possible future technological advancements. The econometric analysis contained in this study is an update of the model by Chavas and Klemme (1986). We used the residual-based bootstrap to test hypotheses regarding the long-run price-responsiveness of supply, and found that the 10-year elasticity of milk supply to milk price is lower in 2007 than it was in 1980. This result is most surprising. One might expect that with better genetics, improved heifer management and larger farms the industry would be likely to react to prices more quickly than almost thirty years ago, when small and medium-sized dairy operations played a major role. A detailed analysis of the predicted herd structure supports the conjecture that a decrease in priceRight now, the price of milk will barely cover our feed costs and to pay our veterinarian. I'm not even counting all the other expenses that go along with keeping a farm running, the utilities, the fuel costs," she said.

"Given the suddenness and severity of the plunge in farm-level milk prices, a significant number of farmers won't survive the winter," Jerry Kozak, president and chief executive of National Milk Producers Federation, said last month.

Farmers have an opportunity to get paid for culling their herds via the farmer-funded CWT program, which was in the process of securing a line of credit to augment its efforts in 2009, according to NMPF's Kozak.


Industry analysts say the reason for the steep drop in milk prices is simple-- too much milk and not enough demand for it. Restaurant traffic is down in the United States as recession jitters have consumers reeling in their spending. About 40 percent of U.S. milk production is made into cheese and roughly 60 percent of the cheese is used in the restaurant and food-service sectors, according to analysts.

Dairy exports, which helped drive U.S. milk prices to the sky-high levels in 2007 and 2008, are also down sharply.

Meanwhile, New Zealand and Australia, two top global suppliers, are exporting more milk products after severe drought slashed production in the past few years.

milk industry still recovering from melamine crisis

The European Union has reinstated export subsidies on a range of dairy products, essentially pricing U.S. supplies out of the market.


"Even in the good times, you're always looking at ways to manage better and keep the costs down. When these extremes come along, it's pretty hard to find anything else to cut," said dairy farmer Brad Scott, of Scott Brothers Dairy Farm in San Jacinto, California.



"In a factory, when things get bad you can always just turn the key off and wait until things improve. In a dairy there's no key to turn off." responsiveness is a consequence of decades-long excessive focus on yield improvement in genetic selection. The intensive production process could make cows susceptible to health problems, imposing biological constraints on the economic lifetime of a cow. Hence, herd expansion decisions will be harder to implement, as culling rates are not easily reduced, and more replacement heifers are needed just to keep the herd size stable

Pontin's rescuer Alex Langsam plans to bring Disney-style resorts to Britain

Pontin's rescuer Alex Langsam plans to bring Disney-style resorts to Britain

California, Florida, Paris and … Prestatyn Sands? Disney-style resorts could be on the way to Britain under plans to revamp the struggling Pontin's holiday camps as themed seaside destinations for children.
Alex Langsam, whose Britannia Hotels empire includes the Adelphi in Liverpool and the Grand in Scarborough, reportedly paid £20m to rescue cash-strapped Pontin's from insolvency last week, averting a threatened closure of the business founded by Fred Pontin in 1946.
Langsam, who accuses Pontin's previous management of "tremendous arrogance" and of starving the business of investment, is promising a £25m makeover. He wants to supplement Pontin's famous "bluecoat" entertainers with Disney-style cartoon costumes and attractions.
"There are things we don't manage to do so well here that the Americans do so well," Langsam said. "If I go to the Disney site in Florida, I'm back to being a child – I see all those individuals dressed up. It's the adults that enjoy it as much as the kids."
Insisting that Pontin's five remaining resorts are in "wonderful" locations, Langsam believes he can spark a revival by aiming for the pre-teen market: "The most important thing for me is getting some of the kiddie generation in, getting the kind of stuff kiddies like into parks on a large scale. The bluecoats will stay, because if it ain't broke, you don't fix it. But there will be people dressed up in all sorts of different ways, too."
During its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, Pontin's had 24 sites, but today only Brean Sands in Somerset, Camber Sands in Sussex, Pakefield in Suffolk, Southport in Merseyside and the Welsh resort of Prestatyn Sands remain.
Demand for domestic short breaks and so-called "staycations" has been relatively strong as holidaymakers cut back on foreign trips during the recession. But Pontin's struggled to compete with the likes of Butlins, Haven Holidays and Center Parcs. Its troubles were aggravated by a BBC Watchdog investigation that highlighted shabby conditions, poor cleanliness and tatty rooms. The business went into administration in November, owing £40m to the high-street bank Santander.
Langsam accused former managing director Graham Parr, who led a management buyout of Pontin's in 2008, of "milking it for money" in order to repay loans and of failing to invest: "There's been tremendous arrogance – that you don't have to control costs, you don't have to control service, you don't have to control staff."
These allegations were flatly rejected by Parr, who said any money taken out of Pontin's was used to service hefty borrowing taken on to refinance the business in 2008. "We did everything we possibly could to keep the business afloat. We were just beaten by the amount of money we borrowed in the good times to buy it."

from - http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/06/pontins-alex-langsam-disney