2021 KPA Year In Review by Kansas Pork Association

2021 Year In Review

Making Connections • Building Relationships • Engaging Conversation

Making a difference.

That is what

we strive for. In 2021, your association continued to work for you, to make a difference. From taking action and being a part of the decisions that affect your industry, to promoting the pork that you raise with hard work and care, we strive to work with your best interest in mind. We’re also making connections - building relationships and engaging in conversation with people who are interested in knowing more about pork and the farmers who raised it. This review provides a summary of what your association has done for you in 2021. Thank you to our many volunteers, National Pork Board, National Pork Producers Council, and of course, our farmers for continuing to be behind our success. We are looking forward to a successful 2022 year by continuing to take action, promote pork, build relationships, and engage in conversation.

KPA Staff President - CEO Tim Stroda Director of Communications Madison Andrade

2021 Board of Directors Chairman: Jason Hall, Elkhart Doug Claassen, Whitewater Ryan Feely, Scott City David Hartter, Sabetha Curt Haverkamp, Bern Kenton McKee, Goff Megan Potter, Abilene Emily Roush, Lebanon Michael Springer, Neodesha Jim Nelssen, Kansas State University

2021: Year In Review

Contents 4

Ibotta Campaign

Bacon Ambassador Program

Social Media Statistics

KFFC Crate Project

Foreign Animal Disease Depopulation and Disposal

KSU Farrowing Building

Virtual Field Trips

Hy-Vee Kids Fit Project

Ibotta Retail Campaign Ibotta is a free cash back rewards and payments app that gives you real cash for everyday purchases when you shop and pay through the app. Ibotta provides thousands of ways for consumers to earn cash on their purchases by partnering with more than 1,500 brands and retailers. Kansas Pork Association continuously looks for ways to connect the consumer to the producer. With Ibotta, we have been successfully able to calculate key learnings and insights to get a better read on what the consumer is looking for. In order to receive the coupon on their purchase, they must complete a type of engagement, either watching a short video on pork, answering a question, or viewing a recipe including pork. In 2021, Kansas Pork Association partnered in sponsorship with the Kansas Corn Commission and the National Pork Board on two Ibotta campaigns. The first campaign ran in the Spring, with a coupon for Any Brand Pork Shoulder, and the Fall campaign ran in the month of October on Any Brand Ground Pork. The Spring campaign was a total investment of $10,000 and gave customers the opportunity to earn $0.10 cash back on any brand of fresh pork shoulder. To be eligible for the rebate, consumers had to read information about the cut of meat and had the ability to click through eatpork.org for a pulled pork recipe. This offer was extended to customers in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Missouri, and Texas.

2021: Year In Review Our Fall campaign was an investment of $50,000 and gave consumers the opportunity to earn $0.10 cash back on any brand of ground pork. In total, we had 497,252 total video views/brand engagements, and 96,490 influenced purchasers, which are customers who fully completed the engagement (downloaded the recipe) and bought pork, with a total of 246,489 units of pork bought by influenced purchasers. One of the key takeaways was awareness of the campaign and how our campaign of any brand ground pork influenced purchasers. There was an average completiton rate of 98.53%, with the top states being Texas, Florida, and California. We did not target states with a strong influence of hog numbers, ex. Iowa, in hopes of reaching a more diverse audience in terms of geographical location.

Most of our engagements came from Walmart at 33%. Other retailers with completed engagement included Kroger, Publix, and Food Lion. When we look at our media overview, it shows an average of 14,000 engagements completed per day, which in turn equates to the completion rate percentage. Ibotta has drastically increased the amount of awareness consumers have of pork products in multiple retailers, as the data proves.

Bacon Ambassador Campaign The Bacon Ambassadors are a group of social media influencers who promote different recipes involving pork. Over the last year, they have posted the most delicious recipes that have garnered likes, impressions, reach and engagement, and each of these have different meanings.

Here is a brief rundown on some social media lingo: Likes are how you react to a post, while engagement includes if you react to the post with a like, comment, share, or save. Impressions are the number of times an audience see‘s a certain post, which goes hand-in-hand with reach, which includes how many different audiences have seen the post outside of our normal group. Just within this last year, our influencers have garnered about 66 million impressions, 5.8 million reaches, and 508,774 engagements, and those numbers continue to grow. Our influencers range in size and scope of their pages, with some having 5,000 followers, to 750,000 followers. “Followers“ are people who follow along with what our influencers post, this then translates to more engagement towards our social media and website pages. Our 13 influencers create buzz around the flavors and versatility of pork. Posts include the hashtag, #BaconAmbassador, which allows KPA to track the reach and engagement, as mentioned previously, of the content created for this program. Some of the featured recipes include pork smash burgers, sweet & sour pork with pineapple stir-fry, pineapple cherry bourbon glazed double smoked ham, and all of the burnt end recipes you can imagine. Some of the highlighted cuts of pork used are tenderloins, pork belly, pork shoulder, pork chops, ribs, and ground pork. There‘s even some tomahawk pork chops in the mix! With this campaign, not only have we been able to dive more into the realm of the increasingly-popular social media reels and posts, but also put some new, delicious recipes into our cookbooks. 6

2021: Year In Review

This program is proudly sponsored by Kansas Pork Association, Kansas Corn Commission, Iowa Pork Producers Association, and National Pork Board. The Bacon Ambassador campaign is another tool, like Ibotta, that can help connect the consumer to understanding how pork can have a positive impact on their everyday lives. Health benefits are highlighted in the ambassadors recipes, as well as noted in the captions. Each of their recipes can appeal to any type of consumer, because if they do not like BBQ, they can easily click on the hashtag (#baconambassador2021) and see more recipes on sandwiches, tacos, and pizza, as pictured below. Additionally, in being able to connect with the consumer on the ambassadors’ personal pages, we at Kansas Pork have the access to repost their videos and pictures on our social media pages. This allows us to reach an even larger audience, which appeals back to reach and how many people see the content being created. There is not a set number of posts that these influencers need to have made per month, but rather per year. This is so they are better able to space out their pork recipes amongst their other posts. By allowing this, more people are likely to see their sponsored content. Our influencers are carefully picked to ensure they understand the importance of making the connection with their viewers and “influencing” them to want to make their recipes. If you visit their pages, you might get hungry! Our influencers handles are @vertsmoke, @bamagrillmaster, @grillinfools, @girlcarnivore, @girlscangrill, @livefirerepublic, @chefqsoto, @grillnation, @overthefirecooking, @tony_and_maribel, @bbqandbottles, @learningtosmoke, and @seattlebutcherswife. We genuinely appreciate all of the hard work they have put in over the last year and look forward to 2022 and trying out some more new recipes. In addition to the Bacon Ambassador program, check out www.eatpork.org for some more recipes.

Social Media 2021 was an interesting year for social media across every front. With everyone beginning to return to their normal routines, many were not spending a lot of time online, yet our numbers were still outstanding. For Facebook, we had a total of 1,185,046 impressions with 596,676 engagements over the course of the year. We also had 75, 546 likes, which continues to grow as we move forward into the new year. Facebook saw a lot of recipes from eatpork.org as well as shares from similar organization pages. We wanted to gear our Facebook page more towards a consumer aspect to be able to appeal to our Ibotta program. By sharing pork recipes, we are then able to influence consumers to buy pork and use it in ways they may not have thought of before (for example: on pizza or in stew). Our Instagram page boomed towards the end of 2021, with impressions jumping from 25,000 in January, to 110,643 by the middle of December. Not only did our impressions increase, but the number of engagements that we received per post, per month increased as well, ending with 10,266 total engagements for the year. What contributes to this is not only from continuously receiving new followers from every post, but partially to our Bacon Ambassador program. Our posts with top engagement come from a few that have been reposted from our Bacon Ambassadors from 2021. The consistent exposure of @KansasPork and Kansas Pork Farmers is what builds our strong following. Our posts on Instagram focused mainly on recipes, similarly to Facebook, yet we also had a couple of top posts that related to our Virtual Field Trip program, as well as a shared post from National Pork Board (NPB) about Earth Day and farmers. Our recipe videos are not only made in contribution by the Bacon Ambassadors, but some are made by National Pork Board staff as well. Pinterest is where we see quite a bit of engagement with BBQ and summer recipes like hot dogs and pulled pork. We have a total of 3,847,821 total impressions for 2021, with 199,415 engagements. Kansas Pork has 4,375 followers, and similarly to our other platforms, that number continues to rise. Trends for social media are in a constant moving state and it is not going away anytime soon. By engaging with consumers on these platforms, we are able to connect the farm to their fork and help them understand where their food comes from. Ag literacy is still a top concern, and by bringing awareness to the consumer, they are then able to discover and gain more knowledge to create a better analysis for themselves about agriculture and hog farming, which leads to an informed consumer. By building foundational knowledge of our lifestyle, we are able to help them make the connection on just how big of a significance our industry has on environment, fiber and energy, technology, and the economy, just to name a few.

2021: Year In Review

YouTube has kept a steady pace throughout the year, with an average of 800 views per month and 9,449 total minutes watched. YouTube is a platform that will be continuously updated looking forward into 2022. It is a great learning tool that classrooms can use to also show videos to their students when making a lesson plan on agriculture. Eatpork.org has had an impressive 68,542 page sessions of people finding recipes to make for dinner or reading on some Kansas farmers. Our website serves as a great place where people can go and find different recipes that all include pork. When we post a recipe from our website on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, we are able to add a link that takes users straight to the website, which contributes to most of our page sessions. As a whole, Kansas Pork has shown strong numbers in 2021 in regards to all of its social media accounts, and will continue advocating for the pork industry and connecting with consumers as we move into 2022.

Kansas Farm Food Connection Kansas Farm Food Connection is a joint effort of ten Kansas ag organizations, including Kansas Pork Association. KFFC provides resources for preparing, cooking, growing food and more, while partnering with Kansas ag producers and consumers. The goal is to educate consumers on how we help to put food on their table, fuel in their vehicle, fiber for their clothes, and how they grow what they do from start to finish. In 2021, KFFC launched the Ag State Crate project, in which consumers received a box that included products from organization partners. KPA provided thermometers as well as jar openers for the crate. For the website, their original target audience was women in Kansas and Kansas City ages 25-54, which continues to be the top demographic and they have published more than 800 stories with partner organizations.

Kansas State University Farrowing Building Kansas Pork Association donated funds for the new Kansas State University farrowing house. The funds were donated for all or a portion of the following: • • • • •

Backup generator Feed bin Farrowing crates Heat pads in farrowing crates Power washer

The farrowing barn currently is equipped with 29 crates and the Swine Teaching and Research Center is maintained and operated by the Department of Animal Sciences & Industry. It provides facilities for research and teaching with types of facilities that are currently used in everyday swine operations. We look forward to seeing the continued success of the swine unit at Kansas State!

Foreign Animal Disease Depopulation and Disposal Pork farmers have made preparation for Foreign Animal Diseases (FAD) such as African Swine Fever one of our industry’s top priorities. A part of this preparation is finding methods to stop the spread of a disease as quickly as possible. One method is depopulation of the farm and the disposal of the animals. KPA, in cooperation with the Kansas Department of Agriculture’s Division of Animal Health, has worked to find funding from various sources to design and build equipment for this purpose. The equipment was modified utilizing information from state and industry partners. Some of the considerations include: animal welfare, number and size of animals, time constraints, animal disease characteristics, personnel availability, safety, operator impact and public perception. KPA will be working with the Department to add additional equipment. There are also ongoing costs associated with having this type of system including periodic testing and personnel training. There will also be maintenance and storage costs.

2021: Year In Review

Virtual Field Trips Virtual Field Trips allow students from grades 2-8 to see what life is like on a pig operation in Kansas and ask questions to real farmers. In 2021, we had two separate VFT sessions in the Spring and Fall. These sessions proved successful, as we had a total of over 100 classrooms participate with over 2,000 students that tuned in over zoom. We also provide each classroom with materials to help them better understand how pig farming and agriculture is important to them. These materials include pig stickers and hats, puzzles, recipe books, and a pig barn tour pamphlet, to name a few. Teachers stated in the post-evaluation that they utilized all materials sent to them either before, during, or after their scheduled VFT. They also agreed or strongly agreed that they thought the field trips were explained in an organized manner, that their students learned a lot and that they would participate again. The majority of the classrooms that participated were from Kansas, with a couple from Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and Texas joining as well. Teachers were also able to respond and leave comments, with one being “I thought it was great. My students loved it too. Thank you so much for the opportunity!”.

Hy-Vee Kids Fit The Illinois Pork Producers Association partnered with the National Pork Board (NPB) and seven state pork groups, including the Kansas Pork Association, on a video and Apple Cinnamon Pork Chop recipe. States used the video to promote to their educator lists, social media and family friendly channels. The video was posted to the Hy-Vee YouTube page. The YouTube version was also included in the Kids Fit Club Newsletter. The video went live across the Kids Fit social media pages. Inside the Kids FitMas bag were aprons, a recipe card featuring Apple Cinnamon Pork Chops, and a coupon to purchase Hormel pork. NPB created a yummly link for states to use once the video was done. All of the ingredients for the recipe were also part of HyVee Aisles online. The statistics from the Pork Chop video resulted in 27,637 views and the short, 3-second video had 29,066 views, with a total of 7,770 minutes watched. The areas where the video was viewed the most was in Minnesota and Iowa, with audience gender being 48% female and 52% male. The Wellness Week Guide was sent to 900+ teachers in the month of September. The guide included 5 activities for teachers to implement in their lesson plan and they must execute at least one activity with their students each day. In 2021, the EAT portion of the lesson plan was “All About Pork”.

Questions, comments, or concerns? Contact us at: Kansas Pork Association 2601 Farm Bureau Road Manhattan, KS 66502 785.776.0442 www.kspork.org