Pilgrim's Europe secured a new long-term agreement with Aldi to supply fresh pork products from its Kings Lynn facility. The agreement will run until 2025 and cover a range of fresh packaged hams for Aldi, including wafer thin honey roast ham, cooked ham slices, premium thick cut oak smoked and honey roast ham products. Kings Lynn is a cooked meat center of excellence for Pilgrim's Europe and was the ideal facility for Aldi to utilize for its popular fresh ham range. An additional 30 jobs have been created following the agreement, with the site also conducting several training sessions for current staff to ensure they are ready to begin production. There is also an opportunity for further recruitment when volumes increase in 2021. “This is fantastic news for the site and for the local area, securing our future for years to come,” said Andy Shepherdson, Site Director at Pilgrim's Europe Kings Lynn. “We have an enthusiastic and hard-working team here at Kings Lynn and as volumes increase in the next few months, there will be further recruitment opportunities to come. We’ll be creating a delicious range of products, and I know our colleagues will be very proud to see them stocked on Aldi’s shelves when they next visit."

At Pilgrim’s Europe, a key part of our hygiene programs is a strong focus on how we design equipment to further mitigate microbiological and pathogen risks. To that end, the company has undertaken a hygienic review of its manufacturing equipment to ensure that it is identifying and eliminating areas of the facility or equipment that may be more challenging to access. Hygienic design principles have been applied, which includes a review of the equipment surfaces, ease and accessibility of cleaning, ease of draining and drying equipment, and enhanced cleaning practices.

The Global FSQA (food safety and quality assurance) team held their second annual meeting in Cambridge, U.K., to share best practices, innovations, and technologies - while empowering FSQA leaders through education, collaboration, and team building. In accordance with this year's tagline - One Team, One Purpose - attendees represented seven countries, encompassing all proteins (beef, poultry, pork, and prepared foods). Speakers presented on food safety culture, robotics, artificial intelligence, and animal welfare. The highlights of this year's meeting included: Building strong relationships among FSQA leaders; Collaborating and learning about KPIs to set global ESG goals; Fostering new learnings while stimulating the exchange of ideas through tours of production facilities; Educating on best-in-class technologies; Learning from external presenters, triggering an exchange of experiences on the food safety culture, animal welfare, and innovation concepts; and Returning home with key takeaways to be applied in their operations.

Pilgrim's Moy Park is a market leader in a number of added value categories in the U.K, including Primary Added Value (36.4 percent share), Fresh Coated (49.4 percent share) and Ready To Eat (36.9 percent share). Pilgrim's Moy Park has driven its market-leading positions within these categories by developing capacity, expertise and the latest production technology. The team has a strong reputation for technical excellence complemented with strong customer relationships, which has enabled the business to continue to develop in these and other categories. For example, recent innovation in cook-in-the-bag and packaging technology and additional product launches in the growing “free-from” market coupled with customer relationships have helped to keep Pilgrim's Moy Park at the forefront of these growing markets.

In response to the growing popularity of online marketplaces and delivery services among retail brands such as Instacart, Pilgrim's sought an additional partnership to help push more online sales their way. Pilgrim's was placing ads within the Instacart marketplace, however, after consulting with E-commerce analytics platform and Instacart Ads partner, CommerceIQ (CIQ), they have seen significant successes in optimizing their presence in digital aisles. Since using CIQ's artificial intelligence-driven advertising platform, Pilgrim's has experienced big success: impression increases of 40 percent, 19 percent growth in market share and 53 percent improvement in media efficiency. According to a LinkedIn post (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6851575222466953216/ ) by Himanshu Jain, CIQ's vice president of product management, “usually these things don’t go hand in hand, but it is possible with [CIQ's] tech-led approach that cuts back on wasteful ad dollars and automatically reinvests in incremental growth areas.” CIQ leverages machine learning, analytics and automation holistically across supply chain, marketing and sales operations to accelerate brand growth with online retailers. They help fast-moving, consumer goods companies win at the moment of purchase and drive profitable market share growth. “Consumer adoption of online grocery shopping has accelerated tremendously and Instacart is a leader in this rapidly growing space,” said Rizwan Akbar, Head of E-commerce at Pilgrim's. “We knew that increasing awareness of Pilgrim's products directly at the online point of purchase would be a critical part of our growth strategy in the coming years.” To read more about Pilgrim's ongoing partnership with Instacart and CIQ, click here: https://www.instacart.com/company/instacart-ads/working-with-instacart-ads-pilgrims-pride-commerceiq-success-story/ 

Pilgrim's and JBS USA have created the Center of Innovation & Technology for Excellence (“CITE”). This initiative is an example of the company's commitment to embrace new tools and technologies that would have an impact on our competitive advantage, especially in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Robotics Process Automation (RPA), Business Intelligence (BI), Virtual & Augmented Reality (VR/AR), and Blockchain. In order to become customer-driven and embed intelligence and digital capabilities into all of the company's processes in the era of digital transformation, CITE will: Support business units in getting more value from their data so they can improve their bottom line; Bridge technical and organizational boundaries by working between business units wanting to improve their insights using data; and Shorten the information lifecycle by sharing best practices and guidance during project executions. Additionally, CITE will partner with business units to move more quickly and cost-effectively with technologies by: Standardizing the platforms architecture, maintenance and administration; Leveraging training and managing relationships with partners; Measuring performance, guiding and maintaining a roadmap for each business unit; and Enhancing collaboration between business units through alignment of people, processes and technologies with business goals. At Pilgrim's, innovation is driven by consumer insights, customer needs and market growth opportunities. We are confident that CITE will contribute to our global sharing of trends, innovative solutions and technology advancements to leverage our collective expertise and lead category growth.