A trade team from the National Pork Board, assisted by staff from the U.S. Meat Export Federation (USMEF), toured retail locations as well as expanding transportation and cold storage facilities during a recent mission to Panama and Colombia. USMEF Chair-elect Randy Spronk, a longtime pork industry leader, said he has seen significant changes in the region over just the past few years that allow for more aggressive marketing of U.S. pork cuts.
?Seeing the retail stores, then versus now – at that time, you know, it was a frozen product but sliced, not packaged, and in an endcap,? Spronk said. ?And I’m just going to be honest with you, I thought it was a very poor display of the product – to coming back in here now how we saw, still was frozen product that was sliced, but it was actually on the foam tray packs and actually wrapped individually. Presentation within the grocery stores is really improved from four years ago. We do see this gradual evolution of the growth of the market, and I think actually the presentation of our product, as the cold chain matures.?
Spronk said those changes make Panama and Columbia ? as well as other countries in Latin America ? the key to diversification for the global U.S. pork market.
?We have a tendency to look to Asia and think that’s our only potential for exports, but really, when you look at Central, South America, Latin America, you roll up all those countries, they have the population and the opportunity to be another Mexico,? Spronk said. ?I think when you talk about diversification, actually, we need to be actually looking south here to actually looking to Latin America to look at Central America and look in South America countries. The difficulty is each one of them is an individual country that we have to look at and grow that market. But Colombia and Panama are just two excellent examples of what we can do- Colombia in particular, as we got a free trade agreement with them in 2012. So, we’ve been in that market for 10 years here, how we started out with $10,000 of Checkoff money just working with producers and there again, marketing generic pork, today here to look at the tonnage and the product that we’re moving into that Colombia in a 10-year period is phenomenal.?
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