In recent months there has been a number of food companies that have restructured their leadership teams to create a new chief position; chief digital officer (or some similar title). Wendy’s and HEB are two of the companies that have focused their efforts on creating a digital first customer experience. In fact, Wendy’s CEO was quoted as saying, “It starts with all things digital, how do we unlock the potential that technology can bring to our customer experiences...”

This quote led me to do some additional research. I wanted to know more about the digital transformation in the meat industry and if there had been a similar phenomenon of meat companies reorganizing their company’s leadership teams to put a focus on digital customer engagement. To my surprise, when I googled “meat companies digital officer,” I found no announcements of meat companies doing the same. I found articles about Kroger moving 600 digital professionals to a new office, and articles on brands like L’Oréal who have hired over 1700 digitally focused employees over the past five years. So, where’s the meat?

Are we lagging behind in making the digital transformation? Maybe we’ve made the digital transformation in some facets such as in-plant machinery and operations; but are as not as far in others like consumer marketing.

At the Pork Board we’ve taken a cross functional approach to our consumer digital marketing. There is no one czar, but instead a team made up of marketing, communications, and IT professionals to form the digital strategy team. This year we’ve been effective at communicating the food safe end-point cooking temperature of pork through a company called FameBit and YouTube influencers. In fact, one of our sponsored posts was trending as high as #3 this weekend; you can watch here.

This is just one example of unlocking the digital potential of meat. Are there others? I want to hear from you. What is your organization doing to help talk to consumers digitally about the benefits of meat?

Unlocking the digital potential of meat

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