Beef Checkoff
Op-Ed: Response to a Vexing Cattle Market
By Jerry Effertz, chairman, Federation of State Beef Councils
It hasn’t been smooth sailing for the
beef cattle industry over the past
year. For its part, the cattle market
has certainly been aggravating. As a
beef producer I know the limitations
of what any of us at the ranch level
can do individually to fully control
profitability and assure that the bottom
line has more black ink on it than red.
Our industry organizations must not
only be aware of those limitations,
but be on the lookout for ways that
damaging outside influences can be
mitigated. Recently the Federation
of State Beef Councils did just that,
dipping into its reserve funds to
support national and international
promotion programs that would
help increase demand for beef.
The Federation allocated more than
$1.2 million from its reserve funds
over the last nine months for this
effort. These dollars come from state
beef council boards who voluntarily
remit part of their half of the $1-per-
head beef checkoff to be used at the
national and international levels.
State board members recognize
that beef production states without
large population centers benefit
from spending their checkoff dollars
where most beef consumers live.
The promotions were conducted during
a time of high protein production
that put significant pressures on
the cattle market. One of the efforts
was a campaign conducted by the
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association,
a contractor to the Beef Checkoff
40 | AUGUST 2017
Program, to drive nationwide
sales of fresh beef at retail.
That promotion is based on a program
called Ibotta, a mobile shopping app
with a subscriber rate of 22 million
mostly-millennial consumers. The
partnership gave consumers the
chance to engage with educational
information about beef and then
unlock a small cash-back rebate for
any ground beef product at any store,
nationwide. The Beef Checkoff Program
paid for the rebates of verified sales.
Results from the effort significantly
surpassed standard Ibotta campaigns.
The redemption rate for ground beef
was nearly 40 percent; the average
Ibotta redemption rate is 23 percent.
More than 1.45 million consumers
unlocked the beef rebate and saw
beef content, such as videos, recipes
and messages, and more than
576,000 redeemed the rebates. In
just four weeks more than 631,000
pounds of ground beef were sold.
Many state beef councils contributed
additional funding to promote the
campaign to consumers in their markets.
They helped drive traffic to the app and
create broader visibility for beef. The
total value of the Ibotta campaign is
estimated to be more than $4.4 million.
But that’s only half of it. International
promotion funded through the
Federation allocation and conducted by
the U.S. Meat Export Federation, another
checkoff contractor, helped move more
than a million incremental pounds
of beef in Japan and Korea. Among
the efforts was a push to have chilled
U.S. beef replace Australian beef at all
Costco outlets in Korea – which came
Jerry Effertz
to full fruition in May 2017. This was
accomplished through USMEF trainings,
sampling demonstrations, regular visits
and meetings to build relationships, and
more. It means an incremental increase
of over 33 million pounds, which will
increase the total U.S. market share in
Korea by about three to four percent.
These results are gratifying, but
obviously only a small portion of
what the state and national checkoff-
funded partnership does daily to help
increase consumer acceptance of and
demand for beef in the United States
and abroad. I’m proud of the work my
fellow beef producer volunteer leaders
have done to oversee these kinds of
efforts, and the staffs that carry out the
programs. And I’m especially proud
of all cattle producers who make this
work possible through their $1-per-
head checkoff investments. I
Jerry Effertz is a third-generation
cattle producer who with his wife,
Norma, operates Black Butte Acres
Limousin Ranch, raising seedstock
cattle and backgrounding feeder
calves near Velva, N.D.