Source: Tom Johnston, MEATINGPLACE, 7/18/17

The chicken industry can blunt the increasing calls from consumers for slow-growing broilers before the trend takes off like antibiotic-free has if companies change the way they market to millennial consumers.

“Slow-growth will be the next antibiotic-free,” Richard Kottmeyer, senior managing partner of Farm 2 Fork Advisory Services, told attendees here at the Chicken Marketing Summit. “If it is, it will be your fault.”

Kottmeyer called slow-growing chickens “a farce,” and the millennial’s way of saying to chicken processors that, “I just don’t trust you to do the right thing, so let’s go back in time before things were so corporate.” He said it comes down to millennials thinking that chickens grow too fast these days because companies are pumping them full of drugs.

As such, Kottmeyer suggested that the industry take advantage of millennial’s noted trust for pet veterinarians and have animal vets communicate simple, common sense messages about the healthy attributes and importance of methods used in conventional broiler production.

Kottmeyer said the industry has erred in its accelerating transition to antibiotic-free chicken in that the marketing is a response to what millennials say that they want. Had the industry focused on the story behind the story of why consumers want antibiotic-free — they want healthy animals, just like the industry does — and simplified the message of why antibiotics are an important tool to reach that objective, it could have avoided all the additional costs and potential health risks associated with antibiotic-free production, he suggested.

He warned that going all in on no-antibiotics-ever programs could come back to bite those companies that did so.
“We lost this consumer in the notion that somehow what we’re doing wasn’t for their benefit,” Kottmeyer said. “Our job is to remind them that in the past things were bad, people got sick, animals weren’t healthy or happy, and we changed all that. Some things you want nature to do and some things you want to do better than nature.”

Despite Kottmeyer’s assertions, Eric Christianson, senior vice president/general manager of marketing for Perdue Foods, a company that has committed to producing only chickens that are never administered antibiotics, defended his company’s decision. He noted that the company does not withhold antibiotics from birds who need such treatment.

“We feel really good about where we are,” he said in a later interview with Meatingplace. “For us, it is about being able to raise those animals in a way that doesn’t require antibiotics, and if we can do it, why wouldn’t you?  A lot of producers choose to do something else because it works for them and it’s in their economic best interest. Well, we’ve found a different way, that’s also in our economic best interest. We’ve come up with a way that we think is a better way. It’s not to say anything bad about what other companies are doing, because it is about choice, but we’re really proud about the fact that we can raise animals without using antibiotics.”

Kottmeyer clarified later that Perdue has a good story to tell, but isn’t telling it quite right. The promise of no antibiotics ever could put the company in a tricky position and can confuse consumers when the company still uses antibiotics to treat illness.
“The better story for a millennial is to say you start with the premise that we can raise chickens to be healthy and not need antibiotics, but in the rare case that they need them, we give it to them,” he said. “You don’t want to use the word 'ever.’”

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