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Want some crushed bugs with your Starbucks frappuccino?

Well, you’d better get on it, because soon it will be too late. The coffee franchise announced that it’s phasing out the use of insects as food coloring in its drinks and food products.

Starbucks (, Fortune 500) President Cliff Burrows wrote, in a Thursday blog, that Starbucks is "transitioning" away from the use of an insect called the cochineal.

Burrows blogged that Starbucks "fell short of your expectations by using natural cochineal extract as a colorant in four food and two beverage offerings in the United States."

He identified the products in question as the Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino, Strawberry Banana Smoothie, Raspberry Swirl Cake, Birthday Cake Pop, Mini Donut with pink icing and Red Velvet Whoopie Pie.

Burrows said that use of the insect dye will be "fully transitioned from existing product inventories" by the end of June.

From that point on, he said that Starbucks will use lycopene, a tomato-based extract.

An earlier Burrows blog from March 29 described the cochineal as a natural product, approved by the Food and Drug Administration, with no health risk.

Starbucks: Venti-sized stock at all-time high

Starbucks spokesman Jim Olson said the company was responding to numerous petitions and individual requests from customers who were concerned about the use of an insect-based extract.

The organization Change.org contacted CNNMoney to claim partial responsibility for pressuring Starbucks with its petition of 6,000 signatures gathered by blogger Daelyn Fortney. The purpose, according to Fortney, was to switch to a "vegan-friendly" extract.

The cochineal has a long history as being used as a red dye, according to Richard Levine, communications program manager for the Entomological Society of America.

"The red in the uniforms of the British soldiers during the Revolutionary War came from cochineal dye," he said. "The same goes for the uniforms of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police." 

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Stocks are opening lower after reports from China and Europe suggested that global economic growth is slowing.

A private survey of Chinese exporters released Monday fell to its lowest average reading in three years during the first quarter.

New European data showed that unemployment in the 17 countries that use the euro has risen to 10.8 percent. That’s the highest since the launch of the euro in 1999.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 26 points to 13,185. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 2 to 1,406. The Nasdaq composite index fell 7 to 3,084.

As traders sold stocks, they bought Treasurys, sending the yield on the 10-year Treasury note down to 2.18 percent from 2.24 percent earlier Monday.

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A former MF Global executive is refusing to answer lawmakers’ questions about more than $1 billion in customer money that vanished in the days before the firm collapsed, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Edith O’Brien, a former assistant treasurer at MF Global, was subpoenaed to testify before the House Financial Services oversight subcommittee hearing about an email she sent in the firm’s final days.

The email appears to contradict testimony from Jon Corzine, the firm’s then-CEO paydayloans. It says he ordered the transfer of $200 million from a customer account on Oct. 28 to cover an overdraft in the firm’s bank account in London.

Corzine testified in December that never directed anyone to use customer funds to fix the overdraft and he wasn’t told that customer money was used.

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It was hardly the stock market debut BATS Global Markets was hoping for.

Since being founded nearly seven years ago, the Kansas-based stock exchange operator has been doing battle with its much larger rivals Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange for a piece of the stock exchange market. On Thursday night the initial public offering of its own stock priced at $16 apiece, the low end of what the company had originally predicted. Intended as a symbol of its newfound stature, the IPO would trade on BATS’s own exchange.

If only the problems stopped there.

The shares immediately plunged to just pennies before being halted. They never reopened. By late afternoon, BATS withdrew its public offering and said it had no plans to refile. All trades made that day would be canceled.

Meanwhile, a problem linked to a faulty trade on a BATS platform in Apple caused that stock to be temporarily halted. BATS also said it temporarily suspended trading of all stocks whose ticker symbols began with A through BF, though it restored that trading by early afternoon.

“We have an electronic mess,” said Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading for broker Themis Trading.

The botched IPO was a blow was not only to the exchange, but to a new business for which it had high hopes. In February, BATS offered free listings to companies whose shares traded a certain amount each day. It strove to define itself as a tech-savvy exchange, and said companies would benefit from its “world-class customer support and technology.”

To help the business, BATS picked a new listing that would be sure to garner attention: itself.

The irony was hard to miss.

“It was the biggest day of the life of the company, and their own stock melts down,” says Larry Tabb, CEO of Tabb Group, a markets research firm. “This doesn’t build confidence.”

Saluzzi called the glitch a “black eye” for the complicated web of more than 40 electronic trading venues that has largely replaced the open outcry system of human traders yelling numbers at each other. “All it takes is one piece of the puzzle to fall, and they all fall.”

The problems brought comparisons to the May 6, 2010, “flash crash,” when a crush of electronic trading glitches caused a stomach-churning plunge in the markets. They also raised questions about the safety of the new stock trading platforms such as BATS that have sprung up in recent years.

High-frequency trading driven by powerful computers and complex mathematical formulas has largely elbowed out guys in jackets on the NYSE floor as the main source of trading. The computers comb the markets for securities priced too high or too low for a split-second, then trade on them.

Though computer glitches aren’t all that unusual in the fast-paced world of high-frequency trading, the embarrassment couldn’t have come at a worse, or more public, time for BATS. Based in Lenexa, Kansas, with about 170 employees, it’s trying to position itself as an alternative to the bigger, much older NYSE and Nasdaq. When companies go public, they pick one of the exchanges to list themselves on.

With memories of the flash crash still fresh, regulators have been taking a closer look at high-frequency trading firms. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether such platforms give some traders an unfair advantage. The Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter, said the investigation includes BATS.

The SEC declined to comment. BATS said in regulatory filing in February that it had received a request for information from the SEC’s enforcement division about “our communications with certain market participants … regarding the development, modification and use of order types; our information technology systems; and trading strategies.” BATS said in the filing that it was cooperating with the SEC.

Friday’s trouble was exacerbated at 10:57 a.m., when a trade on a BATS platform marked 100 Apple shares as $542.80 for a millisecond, when a split-second earlier Apple had been $598.26.

That triggered a “circuit breaker,” which is meant to alert traders when a stock trades at a price that is significantly different from its previous price.

BATS temporarily halted trading of all stocks whose tickers began with A through BF. It said later that a “systems issue” had affected those stocks, and that the issue was corrected by 12:50 p.m.

BATS and the Nasdaq, where Apple is normally traded, both declared “self-help” against each other. Exchanges are normally required to consider other exchanges’ prices when accepting order prices. But they can declare “self-help,” meaning they do not need to consider another exchange’s price, when the other exchange is malfunctioning, said Manoj Narang, chief executive of Tradeworx.

BATS’ motto is “Making Markets Better.”

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The head of the European Central Bank said Greece’s compliance with its bailout agreement must be “flawless” for the financially struggling country to avoid worse trouble.

ECB head Mario Draghi said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that “the key to controlling risks lies with the implementation of the program, which has to be flawless.”

Greece has agreed to reduce wages, cut spending and make its economy more business-friendly in return for a second, euro130 billion ($173 billion) bailout from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund.

The harsh cutbacks have drawn opposition in Greece, which is in a deep recession.

Draghi said it was crucial for any government to support the agreed program of reforms, even after elections that are expected in March.

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St. Louis • It took less than 90 minutes - with a 20-minute break - for the city on Monday to sell off 162 acres of land it had spent decades accumulating.

In a series of unanimous votes, three city panels agreed to sell developer Paul McKee 1,233 pieces of land, and an option to buy the massive former Pruitt-Igoe site, for $3.2 million and promises that his stalled NorthSide Regeneration project will start to move forward.

Altogether, the purchases will more than double McKee’s holdings on the city’s near north side, where he has been working for eight years to assemble land for a project he says could transform some of St. Louis’ most battered neighborhoods. Taking on hundreds of city-owned parcels, most of which have long sat vacant, will enable him to market larger sites - in some cases whole blocks - to potential tenants, McKee said. That should make more deals feasible, he said.

Largely unmentioned was the ongoing lawsuit that has slowed the project. It has been nearly two years since a city judge tossed out $390 million in tax increment financing, which has stalled road and sewer work in the area. An Appeals Court heard oral arguments in the case earlier this month; a decision is expected soon.

In the meantime, McKee keeps talking with prospective tenants, and he shared more details Monday.

Grace Hill Health Centers is planning a clinic in the project area, he said, and Sunshine Ministries is preparing to move into 40,000 square feet of new space. A biotech company McKee wouldn’t name is interested in a project near the old Carr School, and various office and retail users are looking at sites.

“We have had interest (from tenants) all over the project area,” he said.

While McKee already owns about 103 acres of the project’s 1,500-acre footprint, it was always clear that he would need more land. He has been talking with the city about buying its property for years.

But the agreement was only announced on Friday, when agendas were posted for special meetings of the three city agencies that own the land. The meetings themselves had all the markings of a done deal, with a few questions by board members but no real debate, and unanimous votes all around.

While about a dozen of McKee’s consultants and lawyers showed up, no neighborhood residents or McKee critics attended the mid-afternoon meeting at the St. Louis Development Corp. offices downtown. The only skeptical note was sounded by Alderman Marlene Davis, who represents a small part of the project area. She asked that 31 parcels in her ward be held out of the sale for other development, which the city permitted.

“If I were sitting in your chair I probably wouldn’t do this,” she told the three members of the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA). “But it’s not my call.”

Rodney Crim, Mayor Francis Slay’s top development official, said the agreement was a good one. It moves more than one-tenth of all city-owned property off the books, adding $100,000 to the tax rolls and saving the cost of mowing and maintenance. Some of the $3.2 million proceeds will pay to demolish more crumbling city-owned buildings across north St. Louis, freeing up more land for redevelopment. And much of the ground has been up for sale for decades, with no credible buyers, until McKee.

“The market hasn’t addressed this issue,” Crim said. “Now we have a developer who plans to address the whole area and is ready to move forward.”

The agreement requires that McKee create more than 160 jobs and get his first wave of projects well underway by 2016. But the developer said he’s moving on a much faster timeframe.

“I need this to happen tomorrow,” he said.

It won’t take long to be official. Monday’s votes were the only public action required for the sales. Now McKee’s lawyers and city officials will iron out details. They plan to close by the end of February.

Then McKee will have two years to find something to do with Pruitt-Igoe. The infamous former housing complex sits at Jefferson and Cass Avenue, the heart of his project area, and is a key piece of ground. But it’s also likely polluted ground, with unknown debris from the demolition of its high-rise apartment towers in the 1970s. McKee bought a two-year option on the site for $100,000, to buy time while he looks for cleanup funding and markets the site to tenants. Taking control for good will cost him an additional $900,000.

Crim said the prices were determined through LRA’s standard appraisal process, which is based on comparable property nearby and other factors. The city included Pruitt-Igoe in the deal, Crim said, because it wants a comprehensive approach to the area.

“It has to fit in. It can’t be an individual use,” Crim said. “And this developer has a lot of business ties that will help him to market the site.”

TERMS OF THE DEAL

Three city agencies agreed to sell 1,233 parcels of land - totaling 162 acres - to Paul McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration LLC, for $3.2 million. The deal includes $100,000 a two-year option for the 33-acre Pruitt-Igoe site. To close the sale, NorthSide must pay an additional $900,000. NorthSide must demolish 200 buildings by the end of 2013 and rehab 75 buildings. NorthSide must perform regular maintenance and mowing, hold job fairs and offer training to local residents. NorthSide must complete three-fourths of its first round of projects and create 168 jobs by 2016. The second round must be half-complete by 2020. Failure to meet terms means the city can buy back the land at the purchase price.

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France plans to unilaterally impose a 0.1 percent tax on financial transactions starting in August, President Nicolas Sarkozy said, brushing aside opposition from the nation

India

European officials said the euro region

Several times each year, the nation faces a widespread, food borne illness crisis. But there’s an easy, cheap technological solution that could stop scares and outbreaks in their tracks.

A relatively simple system of QR codes — those funny-looking, two-dimensional barcodes you see everywhere today — could instantaneously link a product sold on store shelves back to the farm where it was grown or raised with a snap of a smartphone camera. It would no longer take days or weeks to determine what food is safe and what isn’t.

The system could even prevent the contaminated food from reaching store shelves in the first place.

IBM (, Fortune 500) has developed a technology called the InfoSphere Traceability Server, which assigns unique barcodes to every step of the food distribution chain.

The farms, slaughterhouses, food palates, shipping containers, trucks, grocery stores and individual products that are using InfoSphere are all affixed with QR codes and tracked. Even specific animals are being tagged and scanned, so you could find out which specific cow your milk came from or which pig became your pork.

Using this system, the orange juice crisis could have potentially been avoided. Rather than halting all shipments of orange juice to test for a fungicide and testing OJ at grocery stores, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has done, the juice could have been scanned and instantly linked back to a particular farm.

How RFID tags will change the future

"Someday soon, this will become the minimum requirement to participate in the food supply chain," said Paul Chang, IBM’s traceability program director.

But the system has yet to be widely adopted. There are some high hurdles to mass-adoption, most notably that for the system to work, every actor in the supply chain has to participate. And participation requires some level of investment in order to feed data into the network and extract results.

IBM already has a small handful of large retailers in the United States and Europe on its system, including Germany’s Metro Group, the third-largest food retailer in the world. But IBM believes it has found a way to get even the smallest mom & pop shops and farms on board as well.

IBM developed the InfoSphere system as a cloud-based service, meaning the only infrastructure needed to operate it is an Internet connection and a smartphone.

Though IBM’s Chang wouldn’t get specific about pricing, he said the costs are "minimal," pointing to the fact that that there are already small, rural farms in Thailand using the system no fax needed payday loans.

"We’ve developed the technology in such a way that it’s just a nominal cost to share and access information," Chang said. "We’re at an inflection point where this could be deployed more broadly."

But even if the majority of vendors, farms, shipping companies and grocery stores adopt it, it would really take everyone to join in to link your OJ to a particular farm.

To make such a global food traceability network a possibility, the food industry has developed an open standard for data recording and tracking. That means customers using IBM rivals’ systems could communicate with the InfoSphere server so a farm, a supplier and a grocery store all doing business with one another would not necessary need to be using the same system.

IBM says a very small percentage of companies in the food industry have adopted the technology so far. But with recalls happening on a weekly basis, and costs of technology falling, some regulators are becoming tempted to impose requirements that companies adopt traceability systems. IBM said is currently working with a small number of government regulators from around the world.

If widespread adoption does occur, it may help stop outbreaks before they start.

Today, testing products for contamination is a difficult and ineffective process. Food companies can’t test every batch, so choosing which ones to test is essentially random.

For instance, Coca-Cola (, Fortune 500) tested its batch of orange juice and found that the fungicide was present. But it also noticed that competitors’ juice was contaminated as well and had gone unnoticed.

Using advanced analytics, companies could know exactly which batches to test. As an example, a sensor in a shipping container of tomatoes that is several degrees warmer than normal could tip off the company to check the product that was shipped on that vessel. With QR tags, testers could know which palates were on that container and test them before they reach store shelves.

The technology is cheap and easy to implement. But until everyone adopts it, contaminated food outbreaks will continue. 

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