So I lo ok at those challenges on those four fronts, and I’m not daunted by the challenges. They’re manageable, but they’re significant. You touched on your evolution a little bit earlier, Matt, so you began as an ambition in 2003 and operational in 2006. Today you’re recognized as one of the premier pork processors in the U.S. How has the company achieved such lofty goals? When we first got started, there was a gentleman who, again, I mentioned Bob Christensen and Myrl Mortenson and some other people that are icons in our industry, but a gentleman named Randy Stacker, and he was talking about the farmers that make up Triumph. And he said, it’s not just their size or how many pigs that they process, it’s the way they do it. It’s the excellence in how they go about their business, it’s why they’re respected in the industry. And each of them is unique. You know, they all have their different setups. They’ve got different geography. We’ve got smaller people in our Allied Producers Cooperative. We’ve got larger producers, but they all bring a level of excellence on the farm, and that culture translated into Triumph Foods. It’s why, when you pull up to Triumph Fo ods, you’ll ask, where is the pork plant, because it doesn’t look like a pork plant. They made the investment to demonstrate their pride in the community and their facility. The capital investment to make sure that we had st ate-of-the-art equipment so very quickly after we started up in 2006, we could start producing products for the most premier market at the time, which is the Japanese market, very detailed products, obviously a long shelf life, because it was shipped overseas, you know, to make high-quality tonkatsu and other items there. So I think that evolution has been kind of a consistent path to wards excellence. And what we’ve done over time is try to figure out, how do we create opportunities for people to grow? And I’ve been surprised in our business how somebody without a whole lot of professional background can seize the opportunity of Triumph Foods. We’ll pay, you know, for somebody to go get their certification in IT, or do some training in maintenance, and watching people’s careers transform helps build the company, helps build us in the community. And so it’s just that daily striving for excellence.
EACH DAY IS CORE TO OUR BUSINESS. IF YOU HAD A BAD DAY YESTERDAY — THE NEXT MORNING WHEN YOU WAKE UP, YOU HAVE A NEW OPPORTUNITY TO RESTART, TO ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE.
That’s really, I think, how we’ve gotten here today.
One day at a time, right? You know, it’s funny you say that. In our mission statement, it starts out with each day, because that’s core to our business. If you have a bad day, yesterday, the machine broke. We weren’t as effective. Something threw us off. The next morning, when you wake up, you have a new opportunity to restart, to achieve excellence. And if we look at it, I forgot about yesterday, we can only live life moving forward, we’re going to be the best we can be today. And we’ve really taken that into our culture and into our daily operations. With that, we can collaborate. Triumph operates alongside Christensen, Hanor, Allied Producers, Eichelberger and New Fashion. How do these partnerships fit into your overall strategy, and how do they strengthen Triumph’s position in the industry? First and foremost, and those are the owners of Triumph Foods. So they provide governance and direction. The wonderful thing about it is that each of those producers has met challenges in different ways. They’ve all got a different background in terms of how they got here. We have some farmers who have sites called home farms. In the Allied
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