China flu
OPINION: This old mutt reckons the latest red meat export numbers bring to mind the old maxim, "When China sneezes, the world catches a cold".
Meat Industry Association (MIA) chair Nathan Guy says, while NZ has an FTA with China, 40 other countries also have access to that market and the time has come to make a big push to tell consumers that our products are better than our competitors.
"A problem we have in China is that consumers look at the supermarket shelf and they see grain-fed beef which they consider superior. It's higher priced and gets a premium, while our lean beef tends to be seen as something of a commodity, and we must change that and other misconceptions," he says.
To do this, MIA, meat processing companies and Beef + Lamb NZ are jointly developing a new supercharged and refocused version of the Taste Pure Nature awareness programme.
The new campaign will be industry-led and funded, hopefully with government help, MIA and B+LNZ have agreed to put in $2 million each over three years and they hope the government will make a similar contribution.
According to Guy, it will be up to the marketing managers of the processing companies to devise the programme.
"We are going to call it 'country of origin' and it will be around our natural attributes: animals, outdoors, health and nutrition - all the great attributes that are currently lost in translation in the market. Our competitors are making similar claims, so we can't afford to sleepwalk given that competition is so rife in China. Doing nothing is now not an option," he says.
Guy says they plan to launch the campaign at a huge food expo in Shanghai in November.
