10 ideas for the pork business🚀

Prime Future 029: the weekly newsletter highlighting trends in animal protein

James Altucher advocates the daily exercise of coming up with 10 ideas. On anything. The objective is to exercise your creative muscle…even if it gets a little silly.

So today, 10 ideas for the pork industry:

1. Turkey timers on pork. The biggest challenge fresh pork faces is that pork is really hard to cook correctly. Cook it too long and you end up with plated leather, don’t cook it long enough and you end up with food borne illness. Why aren’t we putting a turkey timer type device on high value pork cuts to help consumers have a good eating experience?

2. Craft bacon. HEB does a “Hatch Green Chili Fest” every August and one of the many green chili flavored items you can find is bacon. I want a bacon selection at Whole Foods that rivals the cheese selection. Hit me with new flavor profiles and combinations. Coffee marinated bacon? Cocoa coated bacon? Clearly this isn’t my expertise but you get the idea. Let’s make bacon the new wine.

3. New cuts. Where’s the tri-tip of pork? The flat iron steak? Merck created an innovation challenge as they look for precision pork monitoring tools for live production. They articulated the big buckets of what they are looking for, put money out as a carrot, and promised a trial with a customer. What if Smithfield or Seaboard tried that innovation challenge model for meat scientists and researchers to identify a proprietary meat cut, or or or?

4. R&D. Increase off balance sheet R&D, aka invest in / work with relevant startups and get that innovation pipeline whirring.

5. Highlight the genetics. Beef consumers know Angus because CAB has done a masterful job of establishing the breed as a signal of quality. Where’s the pork equivalent?

6. Bring virtual reality to the pork case. McDonald’s Europe dabbled with some virtual reality to show its customers a glimpse of the farm. But I’m not sure seeing the farm while you’re at the grocery store is the most compelling. What if instead VR was deployed to help the shopper visualize cooking the pork to prepare a meal in the kitchen? Pop on a VR headset and see Ree Drummond (Pioneer Woman) preparing pork chops and showing me how to do the same? Yes please.

7. Robotics, ML, and AI in processing. Tyson may be leading the charge in robotics from a processor standpoint, but one of the most interesting companies enabling computer vision and machine learning in the plant is P&P Optica. Related, Tyson’s recent announcement on using tech to enable employees to inspect trim lines….game on.

8. Quality differentiation. How can I buy the premium option if there’s no premium option? How can I buy the mid-level option if there’s no mid-level? If pork is pork, well…..that’s a commodity.

9. Pork nuggets. Why isn’t this a thing?

10. More Newman Farms. D2C at scale. Differentiation at scale. Listening to consumers at scale.

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