Ballpark gourmet

A new baseball season means a new food roster on the menus of many ballparks around the country. Foodservice supplier Aramark has announced several new meat dishes making their major league debut this baseball season.

Gone are the days of simple ballpark hot dogs – today’s baseball fans can enjoy something new and different on a bun. At Marlins Park in Miami, fanatics can enjoy the Bayou City Hot Dog – a Nolan Ryan hot dog topped with smoked burnt ends, Rico’s cheese sauce, pickle chips, green onions and hot barbecue sauce. New York Mets fans at Citi Field can partake in a Bases Loaded Dog – a Nathan’s footlong hot dog covered with cheddar fondue, applewood smoked bacon and green onions on a potato roll. And hungry Royals fans at Kauffman Stadium can enjoy a smoked pork kielbasa covered in barbecue sauce and daikon kimchi slaw.

Chuck knows beef

Consumers looking for information about beef need to only keep one name in mind – Chuck. Chuck Knows Beef, powered by Google AI, features cooking skills consumers can access for free via desktop, smartphone, the Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker.

Chuck Knows Beef uses the same “brain” or API that powers Beef. It’s what’s for Dinner.com, said Bridget Wasser, executive director, Meat Science and Supply Chain Outreach for the “Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner.” brand. It pulls the answers to questions from content that’s already populated on the website.

A beta test and soft launch of the Chuck Knows Beef ‘skill’ occurred last fall and lasted into winter, and now Chuck Knows Beef officially is live.

Overheard

“This is our job. This is our livelihood. This is what we’re passionate about…The risk of no transparency is worse than the risk of being transparent.”

– Farmer Lauren Arbogast, during a presentation on transparency at the 2019 Annual Meat Conference

The king of beer and pork

Coleman Natural Foods announced a new partnership with Budweiser Beer to market a line of barbecue sauces and meat products which includes beer-infused barbecue sauces, pre-cooked St. Louis-style ribs, beer brats and other pork products. The promotional partnership is designed to make a splash in a retail prepared meats segment some believe is becoming stale.

“It was a collaboration of two iconic American brands that came together to disrupt a stagnant category for the retailers,” said Bart Vittori, general manager of Coleman Natural Meats. “With the category at just 0.7 percent growth, just names of brands would change, but there was no growth; there was nothing to trigger more interest in the category.”

Vittori explained that the combination of Coleman’s all-natural pork and Budweiser, which has enviable brand recognition, would generate interest across generations.

“There are a lot of beer sausages out there, but the fact of the matter is, this is Budweiser,” Vittori said.