David Hayden, Regional Sales Manager of JBT FoodTech, discussed how TheMeatWeEat.com has done in its first year of existence and what plans are in the future for the site.
Andy Hanacek: We’re going to do a couple different things. Maybe get away from the AMSA booth, but I appreciate AMSA and you taking the time to talk to me today about TheMeatWeEat.com, the consumer outreach website for AMSA. It’s been a little over a year. Just celebrated its first Internet birthday of being in existence. Tell me a little bit about the first year.
David Hayden: I think some of our major milestones were obviously the launch. We were creating this platform for our consumers to go to find all the answers they needed about the meat industry. We were able to develop an Ask Meat Scientist page, which is very good. Consumers can send their direct questions or concerns about anything meat related, and we get those to our meat scientists and come up with an answer. If we need a white paper on it and follow up, we can certainly do that and get that on the website. I think some of the bigger launches we’ve had in the year [is] we have some webinars on the website now [and] we have various podcasts. We have a Featured Meat Scientist page, actually a rotating page, where we feature various meat scientists within the American Meat Scientist Association. That’s been a very good milestone.
Hanacek: Great. So one year in, I’m sure you guys have big plans for the future. Give us a few sneak peek highlights on what to expect from TheMeatWeEat.com next year.
Hayden: You will be able to expect a lot of fact sheets, infographic type fact sheets. We’ve got some in the works right now. You can also expect a cut sheet. What I mean by that is we’re going to have an interactive page within the website and platform where consumers can come in and know exactly what they are buying, where it is coming from on the animal, how to prepare that piece of meat and how to best season it. We’d like to integrate in the future possibly some culinary aspects to utilize our members as well as some outside members from the culinary world as well, because that’s what our consumers want. The millennials are a generation of people who don’t know how to cook. They didn’t grow up in the kitchen, but they are trying to go back in that direction. To provide a platform to find everything they need to know from a meat perspective or protein perspective is what we would like to do there.
