Eat Meat

Surviving a crisis of customer confidence.

Evan Spence | 2003-05-27

The Alberta Beef Producers
#216, 6715 - 8th Street NE
Calgary, AB T2E 7H7

Sirs:

I am Evan Spence, co-editor and publisher of the weekly Internet serial pintday.org. We publish contemporary editorial content, and provide what could be loosely defined as consumer watchdog services.

On Tuesday, May 20, my wife broke the news to me that a cow had been discovered in a northern Alberta herd with mad cow disease. My heart sank. Having recently been in England during the hoof and mouth epidemic, the memories of stacks of cattle carcasses ablaze in quarantined fields were fresh in my mind.

This is alarmist. I know Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy cannot be transferred directly from animal to animal like hoof and mouth disease. I know BSE can only be transferred through the food supply, and I know that Alberta producers don’t feed cows to cows.

The steak-buying public don’t care. The media fuels the alarm, and they dwell on the sensational aspects of the story, such as the closed borders, the transmission of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease to humans, and the nearly 10% drop in fast foot chain share prices.

Alberta Beef Producers, you have a problem.

Fortunately, there’s still plenty of opportunity for a successful conclusion to this crisis.

Learning from Tylenol

Remember the Tylenol scare in 1982? Seven people in Chicago died from cyanide poisoning from tampered doses of Extra-Strength Tylenol. This tragedy became a seminal case study in how to manage a commercial crisis. As soon as Johnson & Johnson discovered the connection between the deaths and their product, they pulled every bottle off the shelf, nationwide, and made public announcements asking people not to use their products.

Many thought Johnson & Johnson would have to re-launch their pain killers under a different name. Amazingly, their prompt, trustworthy response and ground breaking tamper-proof packaging improvements—now the industry standard—enabled Tylenol to grasp an even larger market share than before the crisis.

Learning from Firestone

Contrast this result with the Firestone tire conflagration of a few years ago. Firestone and Ford played pin-the-blame on each other over whose product was more faulty: the tires that wanted to explode, or the SUVs that wanted to overturn when a tire blew. The result was the destruction of a decades-old working relationship between the two companies, and a consuming public that trusted neither.

I did not write this letter to fill you in on ancient consumer history. I wrote this to admonish you for not keeping your web site up to date with these latest critical news events.

When I wanted information on this first case of BSE , I went straight to albertabeef.org. To my amazed disappointment, the most recent news item was the May 12 article on the “First International Beef Industry Congress to be Launched at Calgary Stampede.” Yahoo.

Even worse, the “Cattle Identification Program Helping Control Animal Disease” article from April 29 turned out to be only a broken link. This is especially tragic, as it was Alberta’s excellent cattle identification systems that enabled investigators to discover the previous two locations for this single infected cow.

Listen. If you don’t fill in consumers with facts regarding this crisis, the media will. And when the media gets around to reporting on anything, they produce only the most alarming, sensationalist sound bites. You sell beef. The media sell fear. Who would you rather have telling the story?

So far, Alberta’s cattle producers have done everything right: they’ve recently voluntarily introduced a new tagging system to facilitate animal identification, they’ve been saying the proper words by asking for more information rather than federal SARS-style handouts, and with their livelihoods on the line they’ve been completely agreeable to the stoppage of cattle movement.

Please, provide us with the facts, and all the facts, as quickly as possible. The more information consumers hear from Alberta beef producers, the more trusting they will be of your product.

SlaughterClearinghouse

You obviously have only a part time webmaster updating your site. It would beho(o)ve you to pay this person a full time wage and however much overtime is required for the next few months, to turn albertabeef.org into the most up-to-date clearinghouse for BSE information.

I’m on your side. These days I live in Halifax, and I haven’t had a steak since I was in Alberta last summer. But I’m making a trip home in August, where I’ll be sure to sit down to the same meal that Jean Chretien, Ralph Klein, and possibly the Rolling Stones have been eating lately.

One last story: While at the Briar this year I met some interesting Albertans from Didsbury seated behind me. We all cheered Randy Ferbey’s rink to their unprecedented, undefeated threepeat victory, and they let me wave their Alberta flag for a while. It was just about as much fun as can be had in Halifax. When we parted, one retired farmer handed me one of your “I heart Alberta beef” fridge magnets, as a reminder of home. It made me realize that I wasn’t doing nearly enough Alberta beef outreach of my own.

The last time I saw your “I heart Alberta beef” bumper stickers priced on your website, they were 20 cents each. Please find attached a cheque for $10.00. Send me 50, so I can help get the word out.

Yours truly,

Evan Spence

Tuesday, May 27, 2003
PD DCI

pintday.org » Fresh every Tuesday.