ACME, Alta. – In the age of the remote control, many people surf past television commercials.
This is apparently not the case for a series of ads placed by Alberta’s pork producers where TV proved to be a valuable promotion tool.
The success of the Roy and Bif commercials last year drew more than 200,000 requests for a pork cookbook after the low budget commercial featuring two neighbors struggling to barbecue pork was aired in Alberta.
Alberta Pork still gets about 50 calls a week on its 888-TRY PORK line with requests for recipes and cooking information.
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Yet consumer research last spring showed the average person is still concerned about the levels of fat and cholesterol in pork.
People with high levels of bad cholesterol in the blood are often told to eliminate pork from the diet. A new campaign wants to show pork can be included as part of a healthy diet.
“If consumers believe that pork is not a nutritional product, they are not going to eat it,” said Andrea Smith, a dietitian with the Alberta Pork Producers Development Corp.
Smith is part of a new promotion team targeting health professionals and teachers to show the nutritional value of pork.
A more aggressive stance has been taken at the retail level. Working with Canada Safeway, the industry has developed cooking labels that categorize fresh pork items in the meat case by their proper cooking methods.
Alberta Pork, the promotional side of the development corporation, is also working on providing recipe cards that carry additional nutritional information for the shopper.
While flashy campaigns may sell more pork, the industry faces other large issues like environmental problems and food safety issues.
“These other things are weighing on our farms and our ability to achieve prosperity,” said public affairs manager Paul Hodgman at a recent producer meeting at Acme.
Alberta has some active cells within the animal rights movement. What is disturbing about their campaigns, such as the recent “Jesus was a vegetarian” is that it took hold in Saskatchewan and Kansas, areas that traditionally are supportive of agriculture, sad Hodgman. Some rural people are campaigning against the industry on the basis of smell from hog farms and animal welfare concerns.
So producers have decided to show the public what is going on in the closed barns by taking a farrowing crate with a sow and young pigs to agriculture shows.
More than 12,000 children saw a sow and her piglets in the crate at the Calgary Stampede’s Aggie Days, a children’s agriculture fair held every spring.
The hog board is also developing a library about pork and will include videos of hogs for background footage for television.
Directors have received media training and a crisis management program has been developed if the pork industry suffers the same food safety scare as the beef industry did when mad cow disease was linked to a brain-wasting disease in humans.
