Ted Higginbottom was happy to see a dish heavy on peanuts this week on the menu at an Asian chain restaurant, but he said the Mandarin Kung Pao didn’t land there by chance.
The 60-year-old Texas peanut farmer said his industry has pushed hard to get peanuts onto menus at restaurants like Pei Wei — a national, 163-location chain owned by P.F. Chang’s. Whether it’s peanuts, cranberries, oats or other products, producers have found that successfully marketing to national outlets can pay off with big sales.
“If not for organizations like the [National] Peanut Board, there would not be as many peanut farmers in the US,” Higginbottom said. “Some of them wouldn’t be in business.”
Some note that successfully wooing big chains can lead to pressure to reduce prices, but Higgenbottom said that wasn’t a concern for the peanut board. The organization started as a decades-old quota system that set peanut farmers’ production levels and prices was about to end in 2000, throwing growers for the first time into a free market.
The board needed buyers — any buyers — and fast.
“All the sudden it became very important to that farmer to market his peanuts,” said Higginbottom, who farms near the West Texas town of Seminole and was a past chairman of the board.
The board raised fees from farmers, then began spending several million US dollars a year promoting cooking with peanuts or derivatives such as peanut flour. The result is the number of top-500 US restaurant chains that have dishes with peanuts on their menus has increased by 39 percent in the past four years and peanut butter almost 50 percent, according to food industry data firm Technomic.
The organization also works with universities to get peanuts onto their campus menus, said Bob Coyle, a marketing team leader with the board.
“It helps obviously to increase the use of peanuts, but it also helps us in not just education, but in feeding a consumer that is going to become a bigger consumer in their lives,” he said.
Growers of some commodities, such as Canadian oats, don’t have such a sophisticated marketing arm.
“It’s something we need to get more involved with,” said Manitoba oat farmer Bill Wilton, president of Prairie Oat Growers.
However, Canada’s oat farmers — who grow most oats sold in the US — have benefited since the 1990s from research indicating that oats can help reduce the risk of heart disease. Canadian oat exports have more than doubled since the mid-1990s, according to the Canadian government.
“Basically when you realized that oats can lower cholesterol, that was really why oats jumped,” said Randy Strychar of Oat Insight, a trade publication.
Oats’ healthy reputation has won it spots on menus at restaurants such as Starbucks. Next year, it will likely snare farmers a giant new customer: McDonald’s plans to add oatmeal to its menus across the US.
McDonald’s won’t say how much oatmeal it hopes to sell, but Wade Thoma, the company’s vice president of US menu management, said it plans to buy a lot of oats. Sales in test markets have been good and not just during wintry weather, he said.
“Despite having one of the hottest summers on record, we actually did really well continuing to sell oatmeal through the summer,” he said.
With 14,000 US locations, it’s a big deal to farmers when McDonald’s adds their product to its menu.
Almost 40 years ago, McDonald’s helped transform the egg business, introducing the Egg McMuffin.
Since then, any number of chains have added their own breakfast menus, including Subway, which has started offering breakfast in all of its 24,000 stores, said Kevin Burkum, senior vice president of marketing at the Park Ridge, Illinois-based American Egg Board.
“What we see then is tremendous growth, more stores offering breakfast,” Burkum said. “And we have seen hundreds of millions more eggs being sold as a result.”
Egg farmer Jacques Klempf of the Dixie Egg Company in Jacksonville, Florida, said a simple formula will tell him what a new egg seller might mean to his industry. A 5,000-restaurant chain, for example, that sells 200 egg breakfast sandwiches a day at each location will need 365 million eggs a year. That’s enough eggs to keep 1.3 million hens busy.
Wisconsin cranberry farmer and processor Cheryl Urban agreed big buyers can be great news, but she warned of a downside.
She’s leery of the bigger, more glamorous potential buyers, such as restaurant chains that sometimes feature cranberry-flavored baked goods.
The prices they demand sometimes don’t pay the bills, she said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS