More people want background on turkeys
Thanksgiving season at Kauffman Turkey Farms in Waterman, Ill., is either the best or worst time to visit, depending on how you stomach such things.
Hundreds of clucking turkeys patter about — nervously? — in an outdoor pen, their pink heads snapping to attention when a tractor rumbles in hauling crates packed with more of their feathered peers. A man swishes at the turkeys with a long cloth to guide them into the plant where they will meet their fate. Some appear to make a break for it and run in the opposite direction.
The Kauffman family turkey farm, founded in 1933 about 65 miles west of downtown Chicago, has been busy with visitors who want to buy their Thanksgiving birds directly from the farmers who raised them. It’s a practice that has gained popularity as consumers care more about the origins of their food, with more customers calling or making the trip in person to ask questions about what the Ho-Ka brand birds are fed, whether they are free-range and whether they are given antibiotics, said Angie Wilson, a secretary at the farm’s on-site retail store.
Recently a family traveled from Minnesota to buy a turkey at the 120-acre farm, one of the few in the region that dresses and sells its turkeys on site.
“A lot of people bring their kids because they want to see the turkeys,” said Susan Kauffman, who works in the shop alongside Wilson and whose husband, Robert Kauffman, is the son of the late founder, Howard Kauffman.
Visiting the family farm, which still uses 1960s-era technology in its plant, is a decidedly old-school way for people to learn more about where their Thanksgiving meal comes from. But many people don’t have the time or stomach for the on-the-farm experience.
For those who don’t, there are an increasing number of options. One of the nation’s largest turkey producers is experimenting with using cutting-edge blockchain technology to connect shoppers with farmers even before they leave the grocery store.
Cargill, which produces about a quarter of all turkeys consumed during the holidays in the U.S., recently expanded a program it piloted last year that allows shoppers to trace their turkey to the family farm where it was raised. Select Jewel-Osco and Walmart stores in Chicago are among the 3,500 retail locations nationwide where the traceable turkeys are available, the company said.
About 200,000 of Cargill’s Honeysuckle White brand turkeys have codes on their packaging that consumers can use _ via text message or on the Honeysuckle White Web site _ to learn more about the farm, including its history, how it treats its birds or family Thanksgiving recipes. Seventy farms in Missouri and Texas, out of the 700 farms that Cargill contracts with, are participating.
“We hear that this is what U.S. consumers are wanting,” said Deb Bauler, Cargill’s chief information office for its protein and salt division. “Here is the farmer’s story, let them speak to you.”
The traceable turkeys are priced the same as regular Honeysuckle White birds. A third of Honeysuckle White’s fresh turkeys are traceable this year, compared to 5 percent last year.
It represents a sliver of the overall turkey market. Some 45 million turkeys are eaten on Thanksgiving, the vast majority of them frozen, according to the National Turkey Federation.
The response to last year’s pilot, which involved 60,000 turkeys from four farms, was positive not only from consumers but also from farmers who were excited to share their stories and strike “an emotional cord” with the people who would eat their birds, said Kassie Long, brand manager for Honeysuckle White.
Farmers opt into the program and decide what information they wish to share – though Cargill is careful not to overshare. The company’s research shows that people don’t want to know the harvest date or each macabre stage of the process, just that their turkey came from a good home, Long said.
“Consumers want to know that the people who are raising it are good people,” Long said.
The use of blockchain, which allows people along the supply chain to directly upload information to a secure virtual ledger that can’t be altered, reflects a growing movement in the food industry to improve traceability for the purpose of safety and to protect against mislabeling and counterfeiting.
A group of 10 major food companies including Walmart, Kroger, Nestle, Tyson Foods and Unilever this year launched a partnership with IBM to create a blockchain to track how food travels from farms to tables across the globe, so that problems like foodborne illness can be swiftly identified.
There are challenges to the system, including ensuring that rural broadband is good enough that farmers can share information to the blockchain, but the technology holds great promise to lower the cost of traceability and improve access, said Andy Kennedy, interim director of the Global Food Traceability Center at the Chicago-based Institute of Food Technologists.
He applauds Cargill’s use of blockchain to help connect everyday grocery shoppers to their turkeys’ origins.
“You could go to a farmer’s market and buy directly from a farmer, but it tends to be more expensive and frankly there isn’t much supply,” Kennedy said. “This is democratizing transparency and traceability.”
Still, Euromonitor research analyst Dewey Warner is skeptical that using blockchain to trace the food supply will catch on widely in the short-term. Not only are there are obstacles such as unfamiliarity with the concept and high cost, there are also questions about much people actually care.
“A lot of consumers in surveys say they are interested in traceability but it doesn’t translate to, ‘I need this product to be traceable or I won’t buy it,’” Warner said. In the long-term, however, traceability could follow the path of organics, which started as a niche market for those willing to pay more but now are purchased by the majority of U.S. consumers, thanks to their prevalence and greater affordability.
Jim Slama, founder and CEO of FamilyFarmed, a Chicagobased nonprofit that advocates for locally grown and responsibly produced food, praised Cargill’s efforts as a “step forward” and “a testament to what consumers are looking for.”
But what matters most is that the farms raising turkeys – often large operations, even if they’re family-owned – match the values of consumers who may want turkeys raised without antibiotics and with access to sunshine and pasture, Slama said.
“It’s pretty exciting as long as the farmers have the attributes that consumers care about,” Slama said.