Farm Director, KC Sheperd, had the chance to visit with the Senior Director of Processing and Engagement for the National Pork Board, Kevin Sheehan about transforming pork’s image in the eyes of America’s Youth.
At the Oklahoma Pork Congress, Sheehan said that pork is currently irrelevant to young people, whether on the menu or otherwise. He said, “We found through our research that there are more air fryers in homes than coffee pots. Millennials and Gen Zs are cooking with air fryers and pork loins and pork butts aren’t air fryer friendly. We need to make pork relevant to them and get them to cook more of it. We know that it is tasty, flavorful, and nutritious, but we need to make it convenient for them.”
Air fryer convenient pork is going to be a smaller cut than a large pork butt, and frozen, precooked products will be more convenient. “We also realized that this generation looks at pork as an ingredient. When you ask someone what their favorite meal is, someone who is a Boomer age might say that they like beef or pork or chicken. When you ask a Gen Z or Millennial, they say, ‘I like pasta. I like Pho. I like lasagna or tacos.’ Pork needs to be an ingredient there, so teaching them that pork is a great ingredient, is what we need to do.”
Sheehan said that when Covid hit, it did the pork industry the favor of teaching millions of people how to cook. He said that people purchased large pieces of meat and used Insta-Pots and crockpots to cook it. That habit had begun to taper off before the expense of eating at restaurants became so expensive that people have begun to gravitate back to eating more at home.
“We have to teach them to cook with pork through recipes, through convenience, through pre-marinated items – we are seeing a lot more pre-marinated items out there on the pork side,” he said.
Ground pork, being a delicious, nutritious, and convenient product, is becoming popular in the pre-packaged meals that people are having shipped to their homes. “When you look at the nutritional value of 85 percent lean ground pork, it has the same lean content of 85 percent lean ground turkey. So, then you get to choose the flavor profile and the texture profile that you like and ground pork sure wins in those.
“When you get the home meal delivered to your house, the ground pork shipped in those comes in what is called a brick pack. It is a little bit different than what you might see at some of the grocery stores, but it is a very convenient option. It is probably one of the most sustainable ways of packaging. There is no soaker pad in it, and it can be frozen very easily so you can buy several of them at a time.”
The ways that the National Pork Board is reaching young people include a lot of social media outlets. “Young people are getting their recipes through Instagram or TickTock rather than from recipe books. They are looking at a fifteen-second video of a piece of pork dropping onto a cutting board and automatically turning into six pieces of pork. So getting in through influencers and geotargeting also works. Several states are high, people population states, and low, pig population states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, and cities like Chicago or Miami. Geotargeting those areas with specific multicultural advertising and recipes, and recipes for millennial moms… that’s how we are doing it.”
