Article: PICKY ABOUT PEAS; In a bid to build stronger store brands, a test kitchen at Supervalu headquarters samples everything sold at the stores.(BUSINESS)

Byline: Matt McKinney; Staff Writer

Deep inside a new test kitchen at Supervalu headquarters, a row of canned peas glint under bright lights. Each can's contents have been spilled into a foam tray. A man in a white lab coat hovers nearby.

"We're not too happy," says the lab coat, a food scientist named Obel Hernandez. "We're not too thrilled." He counts the mashed, dented or smushed ones, enters notes into a laptop computer, then considers what happened that morning during the testing of carrots: They were too mushy.

Anywhere else, this kind of attention to the constitution of canned vegetables would be frivolous, or even alarming, but for ...

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