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Working to make ‘sustainability’ a non-issue

bruett-cameron-jbsThe sustainability of beef production continues to be a hot topic in many food circles.

The president of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef Production, Cameron Bruett, says the beef industry needs to make sustainability a non-issue, just as it was able to do with food safety.

“If you look at the modern consumer, they don’t go into a grocery store and consider one item safe and another item unsafe—and then make a purchasing decision based upon ‘the beef comes from this company as opposed to this company’,” Bruett says. “We’ve done a great job with beef when it comes to E.coli—it’s just an incredible success story—so consumers have confidence in the safety of our product.”

Bruett says the beef industry needs to do the same with “sustainability”, because more and more consumers are asking questions like: How was the beef produced—what’s the environmental footprint—and is it local, organic or grassfed?

“I think we need to be focused on this issue to where a consumer can go into a grocery store, look at the meat case, and say, ‘if it’s in my grocery store, it’s sustainable’—and not try to pick winners and losers like we’re doing now, where we’re making marketing claims around certain niche systems that I don’t believe are accurate or true,” Bruett says.

Bruett is head of corporate affairs for meat packer JBS-USA.  He made his comments in an interview with Brownfield in December at the annual meeting of Nebraska Cattlemen.

AUDIO: Cameron Bruett

 

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