‘Pure beef’ campaign | Off-shore sources concern Alberta producers
FORT MACLEOD, Alta. — A beef promotion launched by A & W Restaurants this fall is proving unpopular with Alberta beef producers.
The “100 percent pure beef campaign” advertises meat from animals raised without added hormones or steroids and has been criticized at nearly all fall zone meetings of Alberta Beef Producers.
Members contend that much of A&W’s beef is now coming from offshore sources, including Australia and the United States, with a small percentage from one Alberta ranch.
“It’s a shot over the bow and we didn’t really respond as strongly as I had hoped,” rancher Larry Sears said at the Oct. 28 Zone 2 meeting.
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“Just about every cow-calf producer has cows that are (added) hormone free, so that product would be available anywhere where there is a good herd health record within Canada. So it was disingenuous to suggest that product wasn’t available and also disingenuous to not identify where they were sourcing their product from to the consumers of Canada. It’s off-shore beef.”
Susan Senecal, chief marketing officer for A&W, said last week that the chain is working to expand its Canadian supply of beef with no added hormones, and that it has a good relationship with Canadian cattle producers.
She added that response to the campaign has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
The A&W promotion prompted a resolution at Goodridge, in Zone 8, suggesting ABP launch its own campaign to tell consumers the restaurant chain is using off-shore beef.
At a Zone 5 meeting in Spruce View Oct. 29, ABP executive director Rich Smith said the campaign shows little respect for the Canadian beef industry. He said A&W will require substantial foreign imports of beef to fill its requirements, which Canadian producers could have supplied if they had been given adequate notice.
ABP vice-chair Greg Bowie said at the Fort Macleod meeting that the association discussed its response when the campaign first arose but decided overt objections would only create more publicity for the franchise.
“Particularly in the rural A&W locations, if all of us guys who are producing the beef go in there and tell them we’re not eating here anymore and we’re not pleased with their campaign, they’ll start phoning head office, and head office will hopefully rethink the whole thing,” said Bowie.
Ryder Lee, manager of federal and provincial relations with the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, told the Fort Macleod meeting that CCA officials met with A&W suppliers when the campaign was being planned and succeeded in changing it to some degree.
“If it came out how it was going to come out, it would have been a lot worse,” said Lee, though he later declined to elaborate.
“Really, you can only do so much before having a public wrestling match that really would have probably given them more visibility than they’d earned in their campaign. It got toned down a lot.”
He said CCA has also taken heat from producers for commenting on the campaign at all. Some of them say the burger chain is differentiating product and focusing on beef, which is good for the industry.
