When asked if she believed that consumers made their meat and poultry purchases based on emotion, Constance Cullman, president and CEO of the American Feed Industry Association (AFIA), got a little emotional herself.
Cullman was one of three key speakers to address the audience at the Animal Agriculture Sustainability Summit, held as part of the International Production & Processing Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta, Georgia.
While Cullman said some people make their purchases entirely based on cost, and those people should not be forgotten, she said she definitely felt there are plenty of consumers who use emotion as a major factor, especially if they have disposable income. She even cited herself as an example, saying that she will never eat at a Chipotle, a chain that has a history of being adversarial with the animal agriculture industry.
“If you’ve got any sort of expendable dollars, you go in, you want to feel good about the product that you’re purchasing,” she said.
The problem with that, she said, is some products give the consumers little information that enables them to make an informed purchase. Simply putting an “absence label” that proclaim things such as “no antibiotics ever” or “no added hormones” does not give consumers enough information.
“The problem is a lot of those labels don’t necessarily reflect accurately the values they’re trying to express and live up to with the way they spend that dollar. And that’s where the challenges come, especially when we come into absence levels. We’ve all heard this, we all know this, but that’s the only thing they’ve got, folks,” she said. “So until we start telling the story about how the values they hold are intrinsic in the products we make, what the hell do we expect?”
“We have got to do a better job of saying here is how we produce a product that is responsible about the water usage that goes into it. This is how we develop a product that makes sure that our animals have a good life until they’re ready to sustain us. We’ve been remiss. We’ve been absent from that storytelling and we’ve been absent about proving to the public that that’s what we do. … People care about their environment, about their community, about their society and about their ecosystem. And they want to be able to do the right thing, (but) they don’t have the right information to be able to do it.”
NAMI: Protein PACT will make more information available
Eric Mittenthal, chief strategy officer with the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), who earlier spoke about NAMI’s Protein PACT initiative, said the concerns Cullman spoke of are what his organization hopes to fix through Protein PACT.
“For far too long we focused on what we’re against. We are for all of the things that consumers, the ultimate consumers of our products are for, but we have to demonstrate that and we have to tell that story and use the examples of the achievements that we have in our industry, to share what we’re for,” said Mittenthal.
He said he didn’t think that the industry has really done that up to this point in time, and that’s a big part of why he sees the Protein PACT program as so important.
