WE’RE SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE WHO HAVE A PASSION FOR FEEDING THE WORLD, A PASSION FOR WHAT THEY DO AND TAKE TREMENDOUS PRIDE IN IT — AND WHEN YOU PLUG IN AND LISTEN AND FIGURE OUT WHERE YOU CAN APPLY YOUR TALENTS, THERE’S REALLY ENDLESS OPPORTUNITY.
And when you plug in, listen and figure out where you can apply your talents, there’s really endless opportunity, and never look back. When we started to expand processing, I remember working with the sanitation team in the midst of scrubbing belts, climbing up on ladders with a stopwatch to figure out how we could do this more effectively, more safely, get good results and also open opportunities for processing. Those opportunities kind of kept coming, and if you meet each challenge, I guess eventually somebody asks you if you will lead the organization, and I was fortunate enough th at the board did so. What about challenges and opportunities, Matt? Is there a biggest challenge currently facing Triumph? And what’s the most exciting opportunities on the horizon? When I took over, we re-established the purpose of the company. We’re a farmer-owned processing company, producing the highest-quality pork products, while creating opportunities for team members and community in the process. There are four pillars. So number one, the challenge is the stability of our farmers. If you think about it, and you’ve been working with the swine industry as a whole, the types of losses that the industry experienced is devastating. And really unsustainable at a time when there’s rising grocery prices, b ut that doesn’t flow through to the processor or to the producer, the farmer.
supply here? I mean, I care about producers generally, because this needs to be a rising tide that floats all boats. So that’s one of the challenges in front of us. The other is we produce really high-quality pork products, and in the United States, pork is the third most-consumed protein, but globally, it’d be the first, and the U.S. is a significant exporter. Places like Iowa, and southern Minnesota are some of the best places in the world to sustainably produce the type of food that a global population that eats, sometimes even three times a day, needs each day in order to sustain itself, and so we need to work on shelf life. We need to look at nutrition, food safety. My team has been pa rtnering up with USDA and academic institutio ns on food safety research. So that’s in front of us, because we need to figure out how we in a sustainable way, in a responsible way, produce the best food, the safest food, and something that lasts on the shelves, that doesn’t have to be replaced. And then between the people who are here, it’s like a small city. Almost 2,800 people here, and we’re the largest employer in St. Joe and we need to create opportunities where people can succeed, where they can kind of start out like me and have a journey. When the presidential election comes around every four years, people around the country will hear the names of Waterloo, Marshalltown, and Ottumwa. Why do they hear those during the Iowa caucus? There’s plants there. These are significant parts of the community. We’ve been blessed, the city, the county, the state of Missouri, are all tremendous supporters of the Missouri business community and agriculture in general. And we like to think if we can create opportunities for both our team members and the community to rise, that it can help push a little bit more back into agriculture.
So what do we do to help use our tools here as a processor to help ensure our farmer owners, but also the other producers that
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