Plastic bags in America are given away free to people buying groceries; not s...
Plastic bags in America are given away free to people buying groceries; not so in Russia. Russian consumers, like many Europeans, are charged for each bag. Because of this, the humble plastic shopping bag is recycled in the most obvious way: it’s reused to carry lunches, books, papers, office supplies and school notebooks and rarely trashed until it is full of holes or in shreds.
The Russian use and reuse of plastic bags make them a very potent form of advertising since the recipients of plastic bags bearing the U.S. pork logo carry them to every conceivable place consumers venture or congregate. This would be reason enough for the U.S. Meat Export Federation (USMEF) to provide supermarkets with plastic bags, but there is another. Because of the value placed on plastic bags by consumers, large-scale gifts of plastic bags are a successful part of USMEF’s ongoing strategy to increase the use of U.S. pork by Russian processors and retailers and to support their loyalty to U.S. pork. The Russian companies reward their customers, and USMEF sees its message on the streets and in the malls of Moscow and St. Petersburg. With funding from the pork checkoff and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), USMEF-St. Petersburg recently gave plastic bags to a group of local meat processing plants and three retailers, which sell U.S. pork. USMEF provided a total of 57,000 plastic bags to the retailers, and one of these supermarket chains produced an additional 30,000 plastic bags bearing the U.S. pork logo at its own expense.
An added bonus to the retailer is that while the U.S. pork logo is featured on one side of the bag, the retailer’s logo is on the other. USMEF and the U.S. pork industry are proud of their product, but many Russians are convinced that only domestic pork is truly of high quality. The co-branding of U.S. pork with Russian retailers well-known to their customers assists in breaking down this belief.
In addition, the willingness of these targeted processor and retailers to conduct this promotion provides USMEF and the U.S. pork industry with the ability to conduct further activities with processors and retailers in the future.
USMEF completed a similar promotion in December 2001, distributing 170,000 plastic bags to four plants in Moscow and four plants and one distributor in St. Petersburg. These companies passed on the bags to their customers at more than 1,200 outlets. The success of this public relations campaign inspired USMEF to repeat it. USMEF’s programs are neither monolithic nor cloned from one market to the next. USMEF’s assesses the best approach for each market and each sector of the individual market. This particular promotion is tailor-made for Russia since most meat eaten by consumers is in the form of sausage, and selling pork and pork variety meat to Russia’s processors is the biggest market.
Russia has been a volatile market for U.S. pork. In the last decade, exports have ranged from a low of 153 metric tons (mt) in 1992 to a high of 56,732 mt in 1995. Historically, the main competitor is the European Union (EU) which sold its product at lower prices owing to subsidies, lower freight costs and freer credit policies. Brazil’s emergence as a primary player in the Russian market has added a new layer of competition. The acute weakness of the Brazilian real has flooded the market with cheap Brazilian pork searching for dollar payments instead of domestic sales for reals. The real has lost 45 percent of its worth since January 2001. In the first 11 months of 2002, Brazil captured 48 percent of Russia’s pork import market. On December 25, Russia banned imports of pork from Santa Catarina, Brazil’s largest pork-producing state because of an outbreak of hog fever and Brazilian pork prices have increased since the ban. Santa Catarina produced 70 percent of Brazil’s exports to Russia and Eastern Europe last year.
From January-November 2002, the latest available figures, U.S. pork (including variety meat) exports to Russia totaled 15,034 mt, 53 percent lower than the same period in 2001 but higher than the whole of 2000 (13,008 mt), and were valued at $20.5 million, also a 53 percent decrease.
The U.S. Meat Export Federation is the trade association responsible for developing international markets for the U.S. red meat industry and is funded by USDA, exporting companies, and the beef, pork, corn, sorghum and soybean checkoff programs.
-- USMEF –