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tion. I think one of the ways we’ve been able to do that was just starting at the foundational level of reinforcing our values. We developed our values a couple of years ago and continuing to live those values and talk about those values, ground us in something that is common to everyone. If you can continue to show the team how what they’re doing every single day is getting us one step closer to living our purpose, then that makes all the difference in the world. It sounds simple, but at the end of the day, communicating and having that feedback is what gets you through any kind of crisis or a business challenge. Stephanie Neil: Let’s move on to the seafood industry. How has the pandemic impacted the general industry? Jan Tharp: In general, I would say it’s been positive for the industry as a whole. What I would also say is there’s a lot of fertile ground for sustained growth. The reason I say that is if you look at some of the trends that we’re seeing, the macro consumer trends and how they relate back to our industry, I think you’ll see why I’m optimistic. The first one being eating at home. I don’t think that’s going away. I think that’s certainly good for retail grocery. It’s not so good for food service, but I think that we are going to be eating more at home for the foreseeable future. Again, great for retail grocery and ultimately great for seafood. If you look at the economy, I think the economic conditions in the U.S., in my opinion, are going to push families into two extremes. One being wealth generation, and there’s people that are going to be pushed into further economic insecurity A challenged economy generally is good for people who are operating in center store grocery. E-commerce is another one. It’s going to continue to grow. Whether you’re buying your products through your local retailer on their website or Amazon or any of the abilities to do curbside pickup, home delivery, it doesn’t matter. If you look at it from our perspective, digital is actually good. It gives us an opportunity to connect with our consumer at a much deeper level than we can if a consumer is walking down center store grocery, and they’re spending two seconds looking at shelf stable seafood and deciding what they’re going to buy. So the engagement, actually, with e-commerce utilized correctly could be significantly better. I mentioned people spending less time in the grocery stores. People are not going to the store as often, [but] they’re buying more. So that’s good for maybe larger formats. That’s good for multi-packs, ready-to-eat items, maybe some value-added items, but figuring out what products fit now in this changing retail landscape becomes important. Then finally for our industry, protein. Protein was on trend before the pandemic. It’s still growing. So as I look at those macro trends and how they relate back to the seafood
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sector, I’m extremely optimistic about our industry growth. We’re seeing it in the numbers. In general, the industry’s up in shelf stable about 17% and frozen seafood’s up about 30% to 35%. So all positive signs for the industry. Jan Tharp and Stephanie Neil discussed workforce development and leadership during PACK EXPO Connects. Watch the full interview at: oemgo.to/pecjantharp
Stephanie Neil: The industry in general is up, but you still have to capture your market share. How do you make Bumble Bee Seafood the tuna of choice when somebody is walking down the grocery aisle or shopping online? Jan Tharp: It’s essentially how do you de-commoditize something that could be viewed as a commodity. So the question is really, what’s your reason for being? What is it that Bumble Bee has that others don’t have? If you look at our shelf stable products, where we excel is in albacore, so it’s a premium product. We’ve looked at the consumer trends. As you may have noticed on the shelf, we’ve changed our packaging, trying to [appeal] a little bit more to today’s shopper. Convenience is key. Whether you’re talking about a pouch or ready-to-eat, or what we call valueadded and value-added just means that there’s been a flavor or some enhancement to our products already put in there. So as we listen to our consumer, which we’re doing a lot more of, and that’s manifesting itself in the products that we are putting out into the marketplace. And when we talk about thinking about seafood differently, one of the things that Bumble Bee has done in the last year is we’ve partnered with a plant-based seafood company by the name of Good Catch. We were the first ones to enter into a distribution agreement with a plant-based seafood company. Again, I look at that as very complementary and a demonstration that we are thinking about the category differently and meeting the diverse consumer needs. Stephanie Neil: Were there some lessons learned over the last year that will influence the way the company conducts business in the future? Jan Tharp: I think that every business on the planet is probably doing a bit of self-reflection in early 2021 on what happened in 2020. Speaking for our industry, we have a very global industry. I would say that we are extremely adept at managing episodic supply chain interruptions, but this one was very different because it was the entire globe at the same time. So it challenged everybody to keep up with demand. So when you talk about what are we going to do differently, I think the word flexibility certainly comes to mind right away. Flexibility in operations. How do you ramp up and ramp down? You need to be able to do both,
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