Transcript from November 29, 2023 podcast

Hello, everybody. Garland West here with another Digging In episode, where we try to take a little bit deeper dive into subjects involving our food and the incredible system that produces it.

Today we have a really fun topic for you and one that I bet tells you some things you didn’t know before. We all know how important research is to our food system. We use sound science to open all sorts of doors, better plants and better animals through improved nutrition, better genetics, better production techniques. The list goes on and on and on. Scientists work every day to unlock more value in the commodities and the staples we’ve relied upon for literally hundreds of years. We get better, more nutritious food and innovative new uses that meet real market needs, and we get smarter consumers to boot. Our food system does more than ever before to provide a steady stream of the data and the information that comes from data so we can all make better, smarter food decisions.

None of that happens by chance. It doesn’t fall out of the blue like manna from heaven. It takes money and lots of it. It takes work by thousands of researchers all pointed toward finding answers to some of the toughest issues we still wrestle with in our food system. It takes a concerted effort to get the word out to people. Today we want to tell you a little about the role played by producers in making all that happen. Not the government, not fancy think tanks, not big business or big universities. All those folks play an important role, but we often overlook what hardworking, financially challenged farmers do to drive research and better consumer understanding of our food.

Today we’re going to talk to two people at the front lines of that effort. Bob Parker and Ryan Lepicier have spent years guiding what’s called a research marketing and promotion organization, or RMP, which are producer funded organizations that take farmer dollars and channel them into highly valuable research and public education. Bob and Ryan head the National Peanut Board based in Atlanta, and for more than a dozen years, have work to turn the commitment of peanut producers across the United States into something really, really important Today, we’ll ask them to tell us a bit about RMPs and especially what the peanut Board has been doing to help in peanut research and promotion.

Bob & Ryan, thank you for joining us at Dirt to Dinner. Digging in, you have a friendly audience here. Peanuts are one of my favorite stacks, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich may be my ultimate comfort food, but in a world hungry for protein and with farmers needing every market opportunity they can find, there’s more at stake here than snacks. Let’s start with the basics. Tell us what an RMP is and why the work groups like yours is so important to the interests of consumers everywhere.

Bob Parker:

An RMP is a research marketing and promotion board. It’s an organization created by the producers of a commodity where they come together and they vote whether to establish an official research marketing and promotion organization with their producer dollars. And the goal is to increase demand through promotion and marketing. And the other goal is to improve efficiency and production through production research.

Garland West:

Well, how many of these organizations are there? I know I’m familiar with the National Peanut Board, but how many of these organizations exist across US? Agriculture?

Bob Parker:

How many stars are in the sky?

Garland West:

Good answer.

Bob Parker:

I counted up at least 25, and it ranges all over the board from beef, pork and egg fluid milk. There’s even a paper and packaging board that was created by the paper industry to generically promote the use of paper. And they do an exceptional job with saying, send a personal note, someone that’s very effective. There’s the mushroom board, there’s cotton, there’s even a honey board, there’s multiple avocado boards. Oh my goodness. Three or four avocado boards, Mexican avocados and avocados and mango board, which is mostly imported. So importers help pay an assessment. They help pay for the funding of these boards.

Garland West:

Is there some Christmas organization? How do you coordinate all of these activities? Or are they totally independent of each other?

Bob Parker:

Well, we’re all under oversight from the agricultural marketing Service of USDA. We’re all, we’re an instrument of the United States Department of Agriculture, if that makes any sense. So we were authorized by 1996 Act of Congress that allowed producers to come together and vote whether to assess themselves a certain amount per unit of sale. In our case, $3 and 55 cents a ton to fund our program. And that’s how most of these boards were created, but some were created through their own act.

Garland West:

Sorry to interrupt, but you said something that really got my attention as a taxpayer. It sounds to me like these organizations are self-funded. This is not taxpayer money.

Bob Parker:

There’s not a penny that goes to fund our operations from taxpayers. In fact, I would argue that we benefit taxpayers by our production research and increasing awareness of the benefits of consuming peanuts, for example. And because of our support for production research, we’ve lowered the cost of production to the point that the price of a serving a peanut butter or snack peanuts today is only 19 cents per serving. So the consumer I think, benefits from our work through lower cost to buy our products.

Garland West:

Is there any kind of measure, how do you go about assessing the effectiveness of the money you spend? Is there any kind of economic projection about every dollar you spend generating X number of something?

Bob Parker:

USDA requires that we do a return on investment analysis every five years. And with that analysis as an econometric analysis, the economist looks at where we focus our efforts and spending and then looks at the impact that our efforts had on those specific areas and calculates a return. And our last return on investment analysis was performed in 2019 and showed over a $9 return to the farmer for every dollar invested by Farmers

Garland West:

Nine to one.

Bob Parker:

Yeah. Did

Garland West:

I hear you correctly on that? Yes. So if I test a buck, I get $9 in return.

Bob Parker:

That’s right.

Garland West:

That’s pretty good return. That’s better than what I get at my local bank by a long shot. Well, you talk about research and you talk about marketing and promotion. Can you give me an example or a couple of examples in each of those areas? What kind of research do you support?

Bob Parker:

We support research in several areas. So we do production research and we also support food allergy research in the production research arena. It’s bottom driven, I would say. What we do is we have so many dollars that we’re required by our charter to spend on production research, and we will allocate this money to each state based on its percentage of the production of US peanuts. We’ll ask the states to seek proposals from their research community and bring those proposals to our board for approval. So the farmers on the ground, the state organizations who know better than anyone what they need and what their issues and problems are actually submit to us how to spend their allocation of the research dollars. On top of that, we also spend money, additional research funds on areas such as genomic research. So how can we improve the genetics of conventionally farmed peanuts without having to resort to transgenic peanuts? Because right now there’s consumer resistance, manufacturer resistance, and so we’ve funded substantial amounts of research along with other industry organizations in mapping the genome of the peanut and then putting that knowledge to use through genetic markers. So breeders now, instead of making a cross by trial and error and hoping it took and actually do a DNA test and see if the trait that they were seeking to introduce into another plant actually took. And then I’ll let Ryan talk about some of our food allergy research because I’ve been doing all the talking so far.

Ryan Lepicier:

I think it’s interesting in the simplest terms, I think of research marketing and promotion programs as a self-help tax that producers impose upon themselves to help solve problems. Like in our case with peanuts in the late 1990s, we saw consumption way down. And remember the nineties were a time of low fat everything, and of course peanuts have healthy fats. So the industry got together around this idea of let’s create one of these research marketing and promotion programs so that we can help to solve some problems that the industry is facing. And one of those was the need to communicate about nutrition to the consumer, about the fact that peanuts are healthy, about the fact that peanuts contain heart healthy fats and protein and things that we need to have healthy lives. On the allergy front, I think this is one of the most interesting stories about the peanut board.

Ryan Lepicier:

How did a bunch of peanut farmers get onto this issue of peanut allergy? When the board first formed in the early two thousands, they got this giant truck that went around the country to state fairs and festivals, and it had a stage that was on the back of the truck and this giant peanut popped up and there were chef demos and performers. And as they took this truck around the country from time to time, someone would come up to them and say something like, how does it feel to grow something that kills people? And they kind of scratch their heads and they’re like, Hmm, this is happening more than once. We’re getting negative comments here and there. What’s going on with peanut allergy? We better learn about this. We better get smart about this. And so they formed a scientific advisory counsel of some of the world’s top experts to advise them, and they ended up getting connected with this guy, Dr.

Ryan Lepicier:

Gideon lack, a researcher in London who had spoken about his theory that children in western societies like uk, the United States, Australia, we’re not getting peanut in the diet early yet. He knew from his work that kids in Israel got a peanut snack called Bumba when they were teething age. And so he was looking for funding to do a study about that very issue, and the board gave him some money. And that study was published and it showed indeed that kids in Israel were fed this peanut containing food early, and the prevalence of peanut allergy was much, much lower in Israel. So fast forward, he puts together this larger study, it’s called the LEAP study. And the LEAP study took over 500 kids and put them into two different groups. One group of kids, all the kids were at high risk of peanut allergy, meaning they had eczema or egg allergy already.

Ryan Lepicier:

And half the kids got peanut between four and six months and half the kids did not get peanut. And when the study was completed after many, many years, it turned out that you could reduce the prevalence of peanut allergy in the peanut eating group by 86%. So those kids by age five. So those kids that got peanut early in the LEAP study, say that again, I want to make sure That’s really impressive set of numbers there up to the Yeah, so the LEAP study took hundreds of kids and put them into two different groups. All these kids had egg allergy or eczema. That’s a risk factor for developing peanut allergy. Half the kids got peanuts between four and six months of age. The other half the kids got no peanut food. Fast forward, the kids are five years old, the study ends and the kids that got peanut early, they had a reduction peanut allergy by 86%.

Garland West:

Wow, that’s really impressive.

Ryan Lepicier:

So when you talk about research and promotion programs and how farmers are making a difference, they’re not only helping themselves, right? They’re helping society at large by funding nutrition research by funding allergy research. In this case a landmark study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that has changed the way that we feed our children. The dietary guidelines for Americans now say that kids should get all foods in the first year of life including allergenic foods like peanuts.

Garland West:

You’re telling me that the peanut industry, the peanut producer in particular, has funded this kind of important research work. Are we talking about tens of thousands of dollars of research, hundreds of thousands of dollars of research or million dollars of research,

Ryan Lepicier:

Try nearly $40 million in research education funding on the food allergy front,

Garland West:

Paid by peanut producers in America,

Ryan Lepicier:

Paid by peanut farmers in America.

Bob Parker:

Absolutely.

Garland West:

That’s

Bob Parker:

Very, that many could have gone for other things, but we felt like it was important to address that issue.

Garland West:

Absolutely, absolutely. I’ve also heard rumors that you get involved in some very interesting kind of marketing promotion activities, trying to organize this little podcast. For example, the travel schedule you guys have, the people of the peanut board are on the road nonstop telling the peanut story. How much time do you spend on the road trying to tell that story?

Ryan Lepicier:

Well, we have a great team here at the National Peanut Board of both staff members and partners like from our marketing agency or consultants that we bring in to help us with the work. And we keep everyone really busy. But the good news is that we are able to cover a lot of ground with a pretty modest budget. So we’re looking at consumer marketing really in two or three big buckets. So the first bucket would be consumer marketing, talking to consumers directly about the benefits of peanuts. And then we have a whole segment of our marketing work that’s focused on business development. How do we encourage new uses for peanuts, innovative new uses for peanuts? How do we encourage food service operators to use peanuts in their operation? And then a third thrust of our consumer work is really about reputation management. How do we defend the reputation of the peanut?

Ryan Lepicier:

So the allergy work would sort of fall under that bucket. How do we work to make a difference to improve the lives of people who suffer from peanut allergy? Of course, we’re working to eradicate peanut allergy, right? That’s the holy grail for us as we want to see peanut butter, I’m sorry. We want to see peanut allergy gone, right? We want it out of the picture, but there’s a lot that we can do in the interim to improve the lives of people who have peanut allergy. So for instance, we’ve funded research on oral immunotherapy that’s using the peanut or peanut protein to desensitize an individual with peanut allergies so that they have what’s called bite protection. The accidentally consume peanut. They’re not going to have a severe reaction. They’re not going to be peanut eaters eating PB and J every day, but they can consume peanut and live their lives without that nagging constant fear in the back of their heads that if I accidentally eat something with peanut, I could die.

Ryan Lepicier:

So those are really three areas of work. Of course, to me, and I’m a marketer at heart, is the consumer work is just so much fun. And that’s really because consumer marketing has changed at the speed of light and it continues to change at the speed of light. For many, many, many, many, many years, it was print, tv, radio out of home, and those marketing tools are still in the marketer toolbox, but we have so many amazing tools we can use now that provide us with data to help us improve what we’re doing on the next round. So I think our key platform now is TikTok and the National Peanut Board doesn’t even have a TikTok account. That’s not how you market on TikTok. So the fun thing about TikTok is being able to work with influencers or content creators have a following to help leverage their voices to tell the peanut story, right? We’re not telling it directly from the peanut board. We’re partnering with people who have followers who care about what they say and then using them to tell the peanut story.

Garland West:

Well, you’re dealing with somebody who has a very strong bias. I’m an old geezer who grew up on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. One of my favorite snack foods is peanuts. We’ve got jars of peanuts all around our house, half consumed from where I leave them, wherever I wander around the house. And then as I’ve grown older, I’ve recognized that in a world that needs more and more protein, especially plant proteins, this is a wonder crop. I mean, this is an incredible product that could help the world meet its growing need for more protein, better our consumers generally understanding that. Is the awareness of this as a, I won’t call it a miracle food, but it is a super food. Is the consumer aware of that? Is there growing evidence that consumers recognize what peanuts can offer?

Bob Parker:

If you went by consumption numbers per capita? I would answer yes. They’re aware that peanuts and peanut butter are a healthy choice for plant-based protein. As we’ve seen per capita consumption rates hit all time records during the pandemic at 7.8 pounds per capita in 2021. It fell back slightly to 7.7 and 22 and held at 7.7 in 23. We do, those numbers are updated at the end of July each year. So we’re holding our,

Garland West:

But still respect,

Bob Parker:

We’re holding our ground. We would love to see an 8.08 pounds per capita consumption number one day. And that’s a difficult thing to attain because peanuts are a very, very mature market in the United States. Ryan mentioned over 90% of pantries already have at least one jar of peanut butter in them. So how do we get people to consume more peanuts?

Garland West:

How do you get food manufacturers to make more products in which peanuts are a component? I mean, how much of your time do you spend dealing with food manufacturers to try to sell the wonders of peanuts?

Bob Parker:

Well, we’re doing the best thing we can do, I think on that end is keep the cost of peanuts affordable to the manufacturer so that it is a really high powered but low cost ingredient. And when you look at the cost wholesale cost of peanuts today, even though it’s up a little bit recently, it’s still half of what it was 30 years ago when adjusted for inflation half.

Garland West:

Wow.

Ryan Lepicier:

One thing that’s encouraging to me is that in 2023, peanut butter reached a record high all time record high consumption of 4.4 pounds per capita. So here’s this staple food that’s been around forever that people still love and are continuing to buy. And the opportunity there for manufacturers is to leverage the popularity of peanut butter, of the flavor, the nostalgia into new products. And we see that all the time. Peanut butter and jelly flavored coffee creamer, for instance, was one that I saw recently. So manufacturers know that there’s something special about peanut butter. They know that there is something special to the consumer in terms of nostalgia. But I do think, to answer your earlier question, that consumers do recognize the wholesomeness and goodness of peanuts as both a food and as an agricultural crop. But at the end of the day, it’s all about they love the way the peanut butter tastes. They like the way that they feel when they eat it. They love the nostalgia of eating in shell peanuts like you get at a baseball game. These are emotional ties that people have to the food that our farmers grow.

Garland West:

Very, the very definition of comfort food,

Ryan Lepicier:

Yes, peanuts and peanut butter are the very definition of comfort food, and it’s pretty amazing to work promoting a product that so many people have an emotional connection to. It makes marketing so much easier.

Garland West:

Let me serve up a softball question to you. What could our government do to help spread the word about peanuts above and beyond what you’re doing? What could they do to help people understand the important benefits of peanuts as a source? Not just of tasty, pleasant comfort food, but something that’s really good for them? Is there something the government can do that they’re not doing? Now?

Ryan Lepicier:

I don’t know that we want to talk about what the government can do since we’re a quasi-governmental agency.

Garland West:

I wanted to give you the chance, so now I’ve done it. We can edit that out, don’t worry. One thing that I wanted to circle back on, I keep coming back to this nine to one ratio, which just boggles my mind. You say you have to have periodic assessments by your producers to sort evaluate the work that you’re doing and judge it. What’s your track record and support among peanut producers? Do they like what you’re doing? Are they supportive of it? Are there pockets of support that are stronger than others, or is it kind of a universal support across all the growing areas?

Bob Parker:

We have a referendum every five years, and since I’ve been here, we’ve had referendums in 2014 and 2019, we will have another referendum in 2024, and our support from producers has increased in each of the last two referendums to well over 90% affirmative for continuation.

Garland West:

Over 90% more than nine out of 10?

Bob Parker:

Yes.

Garland West:

Okay. How does that compare with some of these other RMP organizations now? Do you seem to have stronger grower support than some of the others, or is that pretty much a typical rating?

Bob Parker:

I think our support is stronger, frankly. One board recently got voted down by its producers and failed to get a majority vote.
So some industries have opposition from within and from external groups. Some of the animal boards have opposition from animal rights groups that have spent a lot of money targeting these boards, which is to me a vote of confidence because that means obviously that animal rights groups think that RMPs are effective in marketing and increasing demand and consumption for meat, so they wouldn’t bother to attack them.

Ryan Lepicier:

I think what we have Garland, I think what we have going for us as a peanut industry is that we’re a pretty tight-knit industry. We’re a much smaller crop than say corn or soybeans, but we’re delivering results where it matters to the producer, right? We are funding research that’s helping solve problems on the farm. We were part of the funding for the genomics initiative, which unlocked the genome of the peanut, which our scientists are now using to create varieties that help solve problems that producers face on the farm. And then we’ve already talked about food allergy, but we’re made great, great progress on peanut allergy and people can see what we’re doing and they can say the peanut board is doing some really unique work that’s really helping to solve some problems that we have, but let’s keep it going.

Garland West:

Well, between the two of you, you’ve got decades of practical frontline experience in this. So I’m going to put you on the spot here and say, I want you to apply those decades of experience, put on your Johnny Carson Carac, the magnificent hat, and tell me what’s going to happen to you, your organization and organizations like yours in the years ahead. How are you going to be called upon to do something more and different than you’re currently being asked to do? Do you have any projections in that

Bob Parker:

Area? I’m sure that, and I’m going to tee this up for Ryan, 10 years ago, the way we marketed to consumers was totally different than the way we market to consumers today. We were doing print advertisements, was our main method of promoting to consumers, and we shifted totally to online and digital. And the risk with that is that our producers may not see our ads in a magazine because we’re not advertising or we’re not promoting where maybe our producers are. But what lies ahead, I think in five years, 10 years will be totally different from the way we’re marketing and promoting today. And now I’ll hand it off to Ryan to talk

Garland West:

About, Hey Ryan, you’re on the spot there. Tell everybody about your new job.

Ryan Lepicier:

Well, I agree with Bob that, and I mentioned this earlier, that marketing changes at the speed of light As a marketer in 2024, you can’t employ the same tactics that you did every year for the last five years. You’ve got to be abreast of what’s coming down the pipeline. Where are the consumers you’re trying to reach? And you’ve got to be on those platforms. I think the exciting thing for marketers though is that we are going to see a revolution in the way that data is used to reach our audiences. And we’re just at the tip of the iceberg with generative artificial intelligence. But I’m super excited to see where that goes. But I also think, not just in marketing, but one of our challenges is that as our yields increase because of the productivity on the farm increasing, we’re growing a million more tons of peanuts today than we were 10 years ago.

Ryan Lepicier:

And the trajectory is that in 10 more years, we’ll be growing in other million tons taking us to approximately 4 million tons. So what are we going to do with all of those peanuts? We can use them in the domestic market as edible food. We can crush them for oil, we can export them. But I think we’ve got to think seriously in our industry about what are some new uses for peanuts, non-edible uses? And Bob has laid the groundwork for exploring can we produce a peanut that has a higher oil content than the peanuts that we eat that could be used to be crushed as oil. So they would basically, the path would be from the farm to the oil refinery. We’re importing peanut oil that we eat, yet we are growing more peanuts. So it seems like there’s an opportunity there to unlock a potential new use. I think it’s been well publicized that a major oil company is exploring peanuts for biofuels. So what opportunities are there for biofuels? As you mentioned earlier, that peanuts are a crop that’s sustainable to grow. It’s affordable and as a food, it’s delicious. But there are other properties of the peanut, like the oil that make them valuable to market segments that we’re just now starting to explore and tap into.

Garland West:

Wow.

Bob Parker:

There’s also been some research on using certain types of peanuts in a chicken ration for layers and for meat chickens that’s showing some real promise enhanced nutritional profiles of eggs and possibly meat, which could increase demand for peanuts if that takes hold.

Garland West:

So peanuts playing a role beyond their own, beyond them being a source of protein. They’re also potentially something that could improve the production of other forms of protein that the world needs. Really interesting stuff. How in the world do you maintain connections with the producers? I mean, peanut peanuts are produced across the entire southern tier of the United States. How do you go about making sure that you stay in touch with the producers that support you? Especially when you talk about the distance between the traditional marketing tools and the experience of producers increasingly in a modern age. How do you maintain contact with your producers?

Bob Parker:

One thing is a biweekly newsletter that goes out to the industry as a whole and then a quarterly print magazine that goes out to the industry as a whole that talks about really interesting issues around peanuts and highlight some of our work that we’re doing. We certainly have an obligation to make producers aware of our work so that they want, we have an obligation to make producers aware of the work we’re doing, so they’ll feel like they’re getting a benefit from the assessment that they’re paying in to fund our programs.

Garland West:

How much time do you spend actually walking peanut fields? How much do you go out there and get dirt between your toes?

Bob Parker:

Living in Atlanta, it’s not easy to get out into peanut fields. I try to get out as much as I can, but it’s difficult to be everywhere else. We have to be and do that. But we do try to go to every state meeting. We have 12 board members. We have 11 primary producing states that have a board seat and we have a large seat. We’ll have someone at every one of their meetings. And Ryan or I try to go to as many as we can, but if we can’t make it, one of our staff members will be there and we’ll talk about our work.

Garland West:

Well, if you’ve got over a 90% approval rating, it sounds like you’re doing something right?

Bob Parker:

Yeah, I think so. But we can’t take that for granted either.

Garland West:

Alright. Well, this is another

Ryan Lepicier:

Powerful way that we’re able to keep in touch with producers Garland, is through the relationships we have with grower leaders in the industry. So for instance, we’re members of the American Peanut Council, our trade association for the US peanut industry. And many of the states will send a delegation of peanut producers who are leaders in their state. And when those leaders know what you’re doing and they value the work that you’re doing, they’re talking about it to growers in their area. So it kind of helps us to maintain those relationships that we have.

Bob Parker:

We have 24, 25 peanut industry organizations, and I’m probably leaving some out when I try to count them up. And so trying to get alignment is extremely important. And once a year we have a marketing summit where we bring in, we cover the cost of travel for the state executives from each major peanut producing state, and their board chairs and other industry organizations are invited as well. This week we head to Chicago for that meeting and we unveil our marketing plan for the upcoming year at that meeting. And we try to get alignment. We say, here’s what we’re doing. Our resources are there for you. All you have to do is ask and we’ll share our resources so that we, hopefully we’ll get them to also focus in the same direction that we are. And that’s something that Ryan has led and hatched some years ago, and I think it’s been very effective in creating industry alignment and coercion or cohesiveness. It’s been very important in developing industry alignment and cohesion.

Garland West:

Excellent. Ryan, you want to add anything to that? Don’t have to.

Ryan Lepicier:

I don’t think so. Bob said it. Well,

Garland West:

You have been very, very generous with your time. This has been very educational. I think that the listeners to digging in will find it of interest. I’d like to thank you for your time and give you one last chance to deliver the magic message at the end of the podcast. If you want consumers to know one thing about peanuts and the National Peanut Board, what would you like them to know?

Bob Parker:

Peanuts are healthy. They’re incredibly, peanuts are healthy. They taste amazingly, start over. Peanuts are healthy. They’re good for you with any and nutrients and healthy fats. They taste great and they’re sustainable like no other nut.

Garland West:

Very

Ryan Lepicier:

Nice. Since Bob covered the functional benefits of peanuts, I’ll talk a little bit about the other thing that I love about peanuts, and that’s our peanut farmers. Our peanut farmers are amazing in many cases. In most cases, running multi-generational family businesses. And if anybody thinks being a farmer is easy, they’ve got another thing coming. Our farmers put a lot at risk every year when they grow the crops that they bring to market for the consumer. And fortunately, I think many of them take great pride in doing that work and are willing to take the risks that come their way.

And it’s very exciting to see some of the things that young farmers are bringing to the table. Their dad, their grandparents, their moms may have been farmers, but these young farmers are a new generation and they’re bringing the same but a little bit different level of excitement and approach to making sure that their business is sustainable for their children.

Garland West:

Wow, that’s very, very good. You’re telling me that they’re tasty, they’re nutritious, they’re sustainable environmentally, and they’re sustainable in terms of perpetuating the family farm that’s made our American Ag system what it’s today. That’s a pretty good summary of an industry. Bob & Ryan, that’s a great note to end on.

Thank you again for being with us on Dirt to Dinner’s, Digging In podcast. I might add a personal note of congratulations to both men, Bob, for a remarkable career in service to peanut farmers in the entire peanut industry and agriculture in general for that matter. And Ryan for his recent selection to follow Bob as the peanut board’s next president and CEO. Guys, thanks for a job very, very well done.

I’m Garland West reminding you to visit us at www dirttodinnedev.wpenginepowered.com. I’ll promise we’ll make it fun and informative.