Company Overview
Brothers International Food Corporation engages in the brokerage and trading of fruit juice in the United States.
The Corp is not a source supplier.
It offers cranberry, tropical, apple, pear, and grape fruit juices, as well as frozen fruits and fruit juice concentrates.
The company was founded in 2001 and is based in Batavia, New York with additional branches in Qingdao, China; and Quito, Ecuador.
To their credit, the products they sell sometimes have Country of Origin on the package label. I see a lot of their FD fruit sold in Costco and other low cost outlets.
For what it is, the price point is nothing I would be interested in.
Key players:
Mr. Matt Betters
Chief Executive Officer and President
Travis Betters
Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Michael DeLaurentis
Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Tropical Division
Bing Qu
Vice President of Asian Operations
Mr. James Betters
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
Also -
Law360, New York
(June 12, 2013, 2:03 PM EDT) -- Brothers International Food Corp. was hit Tuesday with a whistleblower suit filed by a former employee who says he was ordered to alter expiration dates on potato chips and sell partially rehydrated fruit crisps and then was fired for speaking up about the problem.
Plaintiff Colin Chase, who says he was the director of e-commerce at Brothers from 2010 to 2012, filed his suit under the whistleblower provision of the federal Food Safety Modernization Act, which was added to the act in 2011. Chase says he was fired after refusing to sign a nondisclosure and noncompete agreement given to him after he had repeatedly brought attention to problems with food products that were being shipped out.
“Beginning on or about April 2012, plaintiff Chase and Brothers manager Cathy Parsons alerted Brothers co-CEO Travis Betters to a batch of expired potato chips that were being sold online,” the complaint says. “Mr. Betters instructed that the continued sale of the expired potato chips should stop until an employee found time to ‘sticker’ the potato chips with ‘new expiration dates.’”
A couple of weeks later, the company began requiring employees to sign agreements that included nondisclosure provisions, according to the complaint.
“This new condition of continued employment was motivated by the fact that some employees, particularly plaintiff Chase, were aware of the fact that Brothers redates and sells expired food products,” the complaint says. “As such, the requirement of signing a nondisclosure agreement as a term of continued employment was in and of itself retaliatory and illegal.”
Stephen J. Jones, Brothers' attorney, said Chase's complaint was meritless.
"Any insinuation by Chase that Brothers’ products were defective is patently false. There has never been any finding of any kind of defective products. We take these allegations very seriously and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit," Jones said. "We plan to file a motion asking the court to dismiss the case immediately."
Chase alleges that in addition to the potato chip expiration date issue, some dried apple fruit crisps had become soggy. He says he asked if those were susceptible to bacterial contamination but was told tests would have to be done.
All of this data is freely found on the 'net.
Before you make an investment in LTS, check out the company, the history of the company, any suit open or pending - then decide if you want to part with your heard earned dough...
FWIW - WISE started doing business as WISE Foods on 05/18/2009.