CRSB Panel Discussion: Using consumer research to understand sustainability drivers and motivations

At the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef’s semi-annual meeting, panelists Amie Peck (Canadian Cattlemen’s Association), Michael Young (Canada Beef), John Jamieson (Canadian Centre for Food Integrity), and Clay Holmes (InterCity Packers Meat and Seafood) provided some answers on what goes on in consumers’ heads when they think about beef.

As the food shortages in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic showed, Canadians turned to their kitchen in droves for feel-good meals. Website clicks on recipes and food prep skyrocketed. While people certainly indulged their sweet tooth, they also cleaned the shelves of beef products. The beef trend, at least, looks like it’s here to stay. How can we capitalize on that?

Overall, Canadians trust the food system, and have a high positive impression of the beef industry. Beef is considered a high-quality product, and most Canadians are still eating at least “some”. Gen Z and millennials are more interested in how food is produced than previous generations, and willing to make purchasing changes based on how they perceive food items are produced. Millennials have a less positive view of the beef industry than previous generations, and feel more social pressure to avoid beef and/or choose what they believe are sustainable protein options. They tend to be skeptical but can be convinced by good information. This creates an opportunity to connect, dispel ideas around negative media content, and provide information to help them make nutritious choices.

Sustainability is a newer and growing point of discussion for the beef industry—but still not as important as cost, quality and safety. We are still in the early-adopter phase, with those consumers who want sustainable options willing to pay for it. After all, the cost of buying into sustainable certifications shouldn’t fall solely on the producers’ shoulders. Importantly, however, many consumers still don’t know that sustainable beef even is an option. And producers aren’t aware of the incentives to embark on this course. We need to communicate the beef message better to each group, and define what sustainability means instead of allowing the plant-based protein sector to drive the story. (As an aside, the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef won an award for its website on this very topic.) Consumers aren’t looking for perfection, but they do want to see effort and ongoing improvement. This is an opportunity to build more positive perceptions around feedlots, explain what they are and what their role is in the beef value chain.

Producers have the biggest role to play. These are the people consumers want to hear from. These are the people who can say they care about their animals and the environment, and that they are working to limit environmental impacts. We need to put a face on who ranchers are and what their values are.

These messages aren’t being heard well enough. Working on public trust needs to become part of the daily routine of producers to maintain that precious social licence. Some have hit social media incredibly successfully. Unfortunately, these are the pioneers not the norm.

CBIN: If you build it, they will come

“A hog barn is a hog barn, wherever it is located. The animals are kept indoors in very stable conditions. That makes it easier to produce offspring for very precise consumer markets,” says Dave Sibbald, Interim Chair of the Canadian Beef Improvement Network (CBIN). “We’re looking to develop that same predictability and scale it throughout the beef industry so we can better match consumer expectations and make the industry stronger at the same time.”

Unless they work in or around the beef industry, it may not be crystal clear to Canadian consumers that the beef sector doesn’t function like the pork or chicken industries. 80% of Canadian beef is raised on the range, using grasslands from coast to coast that aren’t suitable to produce any other food. This has led to a wide genetic diversity needed to derive the best animal for each environment and management approach, and to specialize in certain products (for example, grass-fed, commodity beef, hamburger).

“The point is,” continues Sibbald, “that different genetics maximize value from different landscapes. It’s not that we lag pork and chicken in applying genetics but that we need to apply genetics more specifically. I believe genetics are the most untapped component of the value chain. If consumers want superior T-bones, we can deliver that—but we have to apply those genetics at the beginning of the value chain.”

Selling the idea to traditional, independent-minded producers (many of whom are multi-generation ranchers, still on their original homesteads) that they should modernize their approach and talk to other parts of the value chain to help them understand what motivates consumers isn’t easy. Genetics is a complex science, not easy to communicate well, and not cheap to implement. Uptake has been slow. CBIN is expected to make the difference, as we describe here.

The result will be a better-tasting, higher-quality product in which the consumer plays a big role. Because, as Sibbald says so eloquently: why produce it if it doesn’t have a market? Indeed, demand evolves constantly. It’s up to producers to meet it. For example, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, secondary cuts were ground into hamburger. Now, they are sought-after.

“Beef is an exciting, diverse product,” says Sibbald. “So, let’s do more of the good—that is, produce more of what we know today’s consumers want, and deliver a tasty, nutritional eating experience.”

The beef industry has fed Canada for generations. We produce 1.5 million tonnes of beef every year. In 2019, we exported 410,000 tonnes of it, or 41% of production valued at $3.1 billion. Those high numbers, which represent jobs and wealth for our country, are only possible because we have a reputation for high-quality beef.

“CBIN is not about maintaining market share,” explains Sibbald. “It’s about growing it. The global market is highly competitive, so we need new initiatives to confirm our leadership and support the great beef message we already have. No other country has anything like CBIN—even though their beef industries are just as fragmented as ours. We have an opportunity to establish our uniqueness in the domestic and global markets.”

Traceability: From then to now

In March 2021, AgSights (here) set out its approach to traceability in a newsletter article with Gentec. Its software tools allow producers to collect and integrate animal data all the way through to the retail pack. Indeed, consumers can even provide feedback on their experience with the product. This last part is really important as it allows consumers to connect the meal experience back to the genetics. Gentec CEO Graham Plastow commented on how DNA is the component that connects all these results to genetic improvement. He recalls how he set out this potential as the shape of things to come at one of his first presentations to the beef industry (at a Beef Value Chain Roundtable in Ottawa) after moving to the University of Alberta in 2007. He used examples from the pork sector, where access to data from across the value chain provided opportunities to improve cost of production (efficient lean growth), the shelf-life of pork in the retail case, as well as the eating experience. All of these using genomics.

“One of my favourite stories is about protecting hard-earned brand values… in this case from KuroButa pork in Japan,” he says. “The pig equivalent of Wagyu beef if you like.” The story can still be found on the web, with the headline: Japan pig fraud prompts DNA test.

Genomics has moved forward tremendously since then, with the sequencing of livestock genomes and the application of genomic selection in most species. Gentec has been at the centre of these efforts in Canada, including the Canadian Cattle Genome Project (led by Steve Moore, Steve Miller and Paul Stothard), which generated sequence for more than 350 Canadian bulls. As mentioned in the AgSights article, AgSights was one of the partners in those efforts. However, we are still waiting to see the connectivity Plastow envisioned when he realized at that meeting in 2007 that every animal would be tagged through the Canadian Cattle identification Agency. More recently, Gentec commissioned reports on the potential for the beef sector but progress in beef has been relatively slow compared to dairy and swine.

“I’ve been saying pretty-much the same thing since 2007—until recently,” Plastow recalls. “Perhaps real change is on the way with efforts by AgSights, the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, TrustBIXS, and the new CBIN initiative taking up the challenge of applying new digital technologies with genomics.”

These efforts are now being taken forward by the beef industry as reported in the article by Sandy Russell of the Canadian Beef Improvement Network. With the 2020 appointment of John Basarab as Head of Beef Operations at Gentec, we look forward to working closely with CBIN to join the dots and help commercial beef producers see the value of genomics for their operations to improve the competitiveness and sustainability of the industry.

 

CBIN: Promising value for the beef industry

The idea behind CBIN—the Canadian Beef Improvement Network—has been percolating for decades. In November 2020, it progressed from an initiative to a concrete entity, under the leadership of David Sibbald (Interim Chair) and Sandy Russell, Director of Business Development.

Today, CBIN has a well-defined purpose—to improve the genetics of Canada’s national beef herd by collaborating across the beef production system to unlock the value of genetic data—and a growing number of partners across the entire beef value chain to get the job done.

For Russell, who grew up on a cow-calf operation in Saskatchewan and has 20 years of experience in agriculture, CBIN is a no-brainer.

“As an agricultural economist, I realized that the lack of coordinated information and our inability to capitalize on what we had was leaving dollars on the table. We have a strong industry but we’re continually under pressure to generate value. Genetics addresses that pressure from the monetary side and the environmental side.”

But it’s been a long haul due partly to the hesitancy around whether genetics really does create value. Producers are busy people, and sceptical about innovation without seeing the proof. And they don’t want to spend their days poring over paperwork, either. Standard opinion says that, if there truly were value to be had, a CBIN lookalike would have been done years ago. Russell’s answer: it wasn’t done because it’s a huge, difficult undertaking, and requires collaboration across the industry. No single organization can deliver CBIN.

In the last year, with backing from the Canadian Beef Breeds Council, Russell and Sibbald started knocking on doors—and found significant industry engagement. Seeing the value in the innovation that lies ahead, the Charolais, Hereford, Angus and Simmental breed associations committed to collaborate and share resources to making CBIN happen.

“The assumption was that they were in competition… not willing to collaborate,” explains Russell. “We should all be proud that everybody came together for the best interest of the Canadian beef industry to achieve a lofty goal. To see that daily, especially at the seedstock level, is wonderful.”

As sometimes happens, once momentum starts to build, it develops its own multiplying energy. Russell was hired full-time in November. Since then, she and Sibbald have been going flat out to keep up, and move into the operational stage. That means bringing the leadership together, agreeing on a governance structure, unifying existing genetics data and figuring out how to collect it in uniform ways in future, and, most of all, improving genetic literacy to help inform decisions at the producer level.

Staying focused on the vision and what CBIN can achieve is helping to overcome the natural hesitancy, as is the determination of the breed associations and the leadership to deliver value from genetics to the industry—and the extension work that Gentec has been doing these last 10 years.

“The science that Gentec does and the resources it brings will be critical to advance CBIN’s initiatives,” says Russell. “When CBIN thrives, so does Gentec—and vice versa. Gentec does the innovative thinking. CBIN is the link for those innovative research and technologies to reach the cow-calf level and across the entire beef production chain.”

In April, CBIN is announcing the Executive Committee members who will lead the charge on the governance structure. Then, announcements about key partnerships.

We’re a long way from the finish line, there is still a lot of work to do” says Russell. “Keep your eye on CBIN’s accomplishments because big things are coming soon that will get the industry’s attention!”