Looking Good
It always seems that if you wait long enough, good news will eventually come around the corner.
There was great news about the industry at the United States Potato Board’s annual meeting held in early March.
Tim O’Connor, USPB president, announced that a recent survey completed in January shows that net negative consumer attitudes about potatoes have finally returned to levels not seen since 2004 when the Atkins Diet and the South Beach Diet were the leading diet phenomena.
In 2004, at the height of the Atkins diet craze, 35 percent of consumers held negative attitudes about potatoes. The recent survey data show that number to be 18 percent in 2011, a number that correlates with pre-2004 surveys. It’s taken a while, seven years, but as O’Connor emphatically stated: “We’re back, baby.”
Good news that only took seven years to find us.
But wait, there’s more. That wasn’t the only good news to come out of the USPB meeting at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colo.
O’Connor also told the audience that potato consumption had actually gone up the previous year. The first time they have seen an uptick in consumption since the early 1980s when they began tracking consumption. Now, it’s only one year that could prove to be an anomaly, but maybe, just maybe, it portends a new trendline for the industry. Now, that’s some good news that took years to travel.
You can read more about the USPB meeting online in eSpudman, where we’ve also shared a video interview from the meeting as well. We’ll be posting more video interviews from the meeting over the months ahead. You also can receive email updates and tweets on the Spudman website from yours truly when I’m out in the field or at conferences.
