050143 Smithfield Breeds Fattier Line Of Pork

Virginia Beach, VA - Smithfield Foods boosted the image of the company and made its fresh pork stand out in the supermarket meat case by building the Lean Generation Pork line throughout the 1990s.

But the company revealed that it has spent the past four years creating a new breed of hog and is test-marketing a new brand of pork that will go the opposite direction -- right to the waistline.

Instead of the lean pork that has attracted health-conscious carnivores, Smithfield is introducing a line that aims at people looking for more flavorful fresh pork, said James D. Schloss, the company's vice president of marketing.

Schloss explained to the local chapter of the American Marketing Association how the decade-long development of Lean Generation Pork transformed the company's fresh pork business. He said the new brand will be the latest effort to differentiate Smithfield and meet a specific market niche in fresh pork as the low-carb craze continues to boost meat sales.

"This is more of pork the way it used to be - tastier with a little bit of fat on it," Schloss said.

The Smithfield Preferred Stock fresh pork hit some test supermarkets in San Antonio and Maine in the past few months. Schloss said he didn't know when or where the fatty pork would hit Hampton Roads supermarkets.

Andrew Wolf, an analyst with BB&T Capital Markets, doesn't see the new brand as any significant shift in the palate of the public. Rather, it's a nod to serve customers who prefer fatty, more flavorful pork and those who treat themselves occasionally with the fattier type.

"A lot of it is catering to to the idea that people are going to, on occasion, give up healthiness for taste," said Wolf. "They're just saying there's another market segment out there."

Schloss pointed out how the popular low-fat products like Snackwell's were very popular in the late-1990s, but people eventually began eschewing the products for less-nutritious, more flavorful snacks. If the pork-consuming public turns more to the fattier pork, Smithfield is ready.

Schloss said Thursday that it took years to educate consumers and chefs on how to cook the lean pork, which dries out more easily. Some consumers just don't like the lean variety, and the Preferred Stock may appeal to them.

"If you breed out all of the fat, you lose a lot of the taste and it's hard to cook tenderly," said Wolf.

Lean Generation hit the marketplace in 1994 amid a sea of fatty pork that was losing ground to chicken as the preferred meat in America. To compete with healthier meats and be noticed in a fresh meat marketplace where branding often is ignored, Smithfield had to do something unusual.

The company bought rights to a special breed of sows from England and flew them to Virginia and North Carolina in 1991 to form the proprietary line of skinnier hogs that produce Lean Generation meat.

Schloss said Smithfield developed a special breed of hogs in 2000 - a cross between English and American hog lines - that is used for the new Preferred Stock pork. It takes about four years to expand the herd, which was done in Virginia and North Carolina, so there's enough hogs to meet the demand for the meat.

By acquiring hog farms and producers, Smithfield shifted in the late-1990s from a hog processor to a company that raises more of its own animals. The production of specific types of pork for specific markets is a Smithfield trademark.

For example, the company exports pork heavily to Japan. But the Japanese prefer a more tender, marbled pork that comes from a genetic line of hogs Smithfield developed in 2003 for that market. Schloss said the new fatty line has some similarities to the Japanese breed.

Schloss said that the low-carb craze is now mainstream and that fat won't diminish the Preferred Stock's popularity with the meat diet crowd.

"If somebody was on a low-carb diet, it doesn't matter if there's a little bit of fat or not," he said.

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