You’ve touched on some of these things, Chad, but leveraging your expertise with your extensive experience in global sales marketing and innovation, are there any additional ways you plan on driving the growth with Seaboard Foods pork segment? Absolutely. If you look at our brands, we look to drive meaningful uniqueness in any of the categories that we’re in. Now, being a board member on the National Pork Board, they’ve done extensive research to show that younger consumers are not gravitating toward the fresh pork category. They over-index on value add in pork, bacon, ham, things like that, but they shy away from the fresh pork side of our business. And so we must win and bring those consumers back to the category. And when you look at Prairie Fresh, which is our flagship brand on the fresh pork side, as well as seasoned and other items, as well as Daily’s, we really focus on driving new customers to the category. And so we do that by one, packaging, right, making sure the packaging really resonates with those younger consumers. But then two, flavor profiles. So Boomers historically have really over-indexed within the value-added categories, or chub sausage, or some of those other categories that we plan to enter; we must attract a younger consumer in order to have a compelling story for the retailers and food service operators that we go out and work with. So when you look at the innovation and the experience I’ve had in the past, how do we bring those younger consumers to the category? So if you look at some of our recent launches, we did launch a jalapeno bacon-flavored loin filet, a Hawaiian sea salt tenderloin, and then right now, we’re rolling out a Nashville hot product that we’ve gotten great consumer feedback on. Again, focusing on bringing those younger consumers to the category, because a garlic-and-herb flavor profile isn’t going to do it for those younger consumers. We’re also doing the same on the bacon side. We launched a steak-cut bacon that has really driven quite a bit of volume and growth for the Daily’s brand within retail, and then later this year, we’re launching a seasoned product that’s really never been seen before in the category: that’s a hot honey and a spicy maple. So really bringing that unique differentiation to the category in order to have a compelling story, both for the retailer and food service operators, as well as consumers.
The sky’s the limit. You guys continue to innovate, drive new activity. Now, when we look at the industry dynamics, I think we can agree the industry is evolving. There’s new consumer preferences, tech advances. How do you plan on navigating these dynamics and position Seaboard as a continued leader in the industry? We use an innovation process within our business known as innovation engineering, and there’s a few key steps to that — it’s failing fast, failing cheap and failing forward, right? Get the product out in front of consumers as early as possible in order to get that consumer feedback. What I found in some big CPG companies is that projects get too big to fail, and they get too big to fail prior to even getting consumer feedback. And so we bring consumers in really early in order to get that feedback and really get that information back in and look to pivot, change flavor profiles, packaging, really early on, so that we know that we’re headed down the right path. You know, my boss historically has used a quote that we use all the time, which is that if you fail to change, you’ll wake up in a world no longer fit to succeed. And so constantly bringing in that consumer and retail feedback, looking to drive new innovations within — and I can speak to some of them here in a minute. New innovation within our categories is really a focus for us. You know, we’ve got a proprietary technology at each of our three plants that judges the inner muscular fat score electronically for our animals, and we rail off our top single-digit percentage into what we call our Prairie Fresh USA Prime Program. That’s been one of the fastest growing sub-brands within our category, and it’s really focused on consumers that want a higher quality and more consistent eating experience. And so that’s what Prairie Fresh USA Prime brings to the table. We go into retailers, completely brand out the case, give them exclusivity within the marketplace. And we’ve seen some incredible results with the retailers who partnered with us early on, on that journey. About sustainability, Chad, I know that’s a big topic in the industry and corporate America. What strategies specifically for Seaboard environmentally, and just overall, do you have for sustainability?
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