CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Ted Higginbottom was happy to see a dish heavy on peanuts last month on the menu at an Asian chain restaurant, but he said the Mandarin Kung Pao didn’t land there by chance.
The 60-year-old Texas peanut farmer said his industry has pushed hard to get peanuts onto menus at restaurants such as Pei Wei – a national, 163-location chain owned by P.F. Chang’s.
Whether it’s peanuts, cranberries, oats or other products, producers have found that successfully marketing to national outlets can pay off with big sales.
“If not for organizations like the (National) Peanut Board, there would not be as many peanut farmers in the U.S.,” Higginbottom said. “Some of them wouldn’t be in business.”
Some note that successfully wooing big chains can lead to pressure to reduce prices, but Higginbottom said that wasn’t a concern for the peanut board. The organization started as a decades-old quota system that set peanut farmers’ production levels and prices was about to end in 2000, throwing growers for the first time into a free market.
The board needed buyers – any buyers – and fast.
“All the sudden it became very important to that farmer to market his peanuts,” said Higginbottom, who farms near the West Texas town of Seminole and was a past chairman of the board.
The board raised fees from farmers, then began spending several million dollars a year promoting cooking with peanuts or derivatives such as peanut flour. The result is the number of top 500 U.S. restaurant chains that have dishes with peanuts on their menus has increased by 39 percent in the past four years and peanut butter almost 50 percent, according to food industry data firm Technomic.
The organization also works with universities to get peanuts onto their campus menus, Bob Coyle, a marketing team leader with the board, said.
“It helps obviously to increase the use of peanuts, but it also helps us in not just education, but in feeding a consumer that is going to become a bigger consumer in their lives,” he said.
Growers of some commodities, such as Canadian oats, don’t have such a sophisticated marketing arm.
“It’s something we need to get more involved with,” said Manitoba oat farmer Bill Wilton, president of Prairie Oat Growers.
But Canada’s oat farmers – who grow most oats sold in the United States – have benefited since the 1990s from research indicating that oats can help reduce the risk of heart disease. Canadian oat exports have more than doubled since the mid-1990s, according to the Canadian government.
“Basically when you realized that oats can lower cholesterol, that was really why oats jumped,” said Randy Strychar of Oat Insight, a trade publication.
Oats’ healthy reputation has won them spots on menus at restaurants such as Starbucks. Next year, oats will likely snare farmers a giant new customer: McDonald’s Corp. plans to add oatmeal to its menus across the United States.
McDonald’s won’t say how much oatmeal it hopes to sell, but Wade Thoma, the company’s vice president of U.S. menu management, said it plans to buy a lot of oats. Sales in test markets have been good, and not just during wintry weather, he said.
“Despite having one of the hottest summers on record, we actually did really well continuing to sell oatmeal through the summer,” he said.
It’s a big deal to farmers when McDonald’s, with 14,000 U.S. locations, adds their products to its menu.
Almost 40 years ago, McDonald’s helped transform the egg business, introducing the Egg McMuffin.
Since then, many chains have added their own breakfast menus, including Subway, which now offers breakfast in all of its 24,000 stores, said Kevin Burkum, senior vice president of marketing at the American Egg Board, based in Park Ridge, Ill.
“What we see then is tremendous growth, more stores offering breakfast,” Burkum said. “And we have seen hundreds of millions more eggs being sold as a result.”
