Lexington, KY - If you're drawn to this column because you're interested in local foods and you like knowing the sources and businesses behind the food you eat, let me be among the first to congratulate you. You're on the cutting edge.
That's all I can conclude after attending Alltech, Inc.'s 26th annual symposium in downtown Lexington last month. I know what you're thinking: another column about Alltech? Isn't there more to this topic than the doings of an animal feeds company?
There is. But if there's ever been an 800-pound gorilla rising over Lexington's landscape, it's Alltech - led by its restless president, Pearse Lyons. That applies to the food landscape, too.
During the year I've been contributing to Business Lexington, Alltech and Lyons have expressed intentions to start farming seafood in Kentucky and to singlehandedly spark a Kentucky dairy farming revolution.
Alltech has launched its own brand of Angus beef products, with the tag line "Always Local" on each label. How that claim holds water when the cattle that make up the product line spend most of their lives in Iowa was a question I explored in previous columns, and I won't go over it again here, except to observe that considering that the company does business in 120 countries, few things in this world aren't local to Alltech.
The company's three-day symposium packed representatives from many of those 120 nations into the convention center in mid-May, giving it the feel of a United Nations session - all the way down to the banks of translators prattling quietly away in the corners.
And maybe that feel was best captured in the presentation by Joaquin Palaez about his experience as KFC's vice president of marketing for its Chinese operations. Palaez is a native of Mexico at the head of a major U.S. company's sales in Asia's largest country; how's that for multinational synergy?
And what three words appeared in the main panel of Palaez's PowerPoint address to the crowd of 1500?
"Localize, localize, localize."
Palaez went on to say KFC - one of the pioneers of the regrettable assembly-line practices that made fast food what it is today - is working its corporate tail off to assure its Chinese customer base that all its products and every ingredient are safe and traceable. And he said the company finds those assurances easier to make the more local it gets.
But another panel in the same presentation said KFC China has established a dozen or so logistics centers around the country charged with "delivery to (more than) 3,000 restaurants and receiving from (more than) 500 suppliers."
That doesn't sound like my idea of local.
My idea of local involves a chef or a grocery store owner, or you or me, rather than a logistics center. It involves calling on a nearby farmer rather than a "supplier" or even growing our own.
That seemed a pretty quaint viewpoint at a gathering where presenters constantly reminded attendees that the world's population is expected to increase by three billion by mid-century and someone's got to figure out how to feed all of us. Clearly Alltech aspires to be near the head of the line, expanding steadily from a concentration on feed supplements for animals to food and drink products for humans - from beer to beef to bourbon, with farmed salmon waiting in the wings.
On its march to seize some of that market, Alltech is making Kentucky a brand. That's why KFC was an invited presence at the symposium. That's why the company has forged a relationship with Louisville's Muhammad Ali. And that's why it has sunk millions of dollars into its sponsorship of the FEI World Equestrian Games.
Because, as Pearse Lyons isn't shy about mentioning, his market research tells him people the world over have fixed notions of what Kentucky is. They think horses, friendly people, cattle in pastures bounded by wood and stone fences, The Greatest and fried chicken. He wants to beam those images right back at them, of course, and except for the fried chicken, that's what you'll see in Alltech's marketing materials for everything from its beef to its yeast products.
It all feels so warm and down-home local, even if Alltech's core business is about facilitating the large-scale agriculture practices that are the antithesis of local.
Some local foods advocates in this town think that makes Alltech one of the bad guys. But consider this: after a day of hosting the gathering of 1,500 world travelers at its spring symposium, Alltech arranged for Seedleaf, Lexington's fledgling nonprofit urban and community gardening advocacy group, to offer attendees a strolling tour of the gardening and food education projects underway downtown.
Seedleaf's education director, Rebecca Self, led the tour. She said it had been Alltech's idea and her organization was grateful for the attention.
Alltech didn't have to do it. And cynics may see it as just another PR move for Alltech, another way to co-opt the growing consumer interest in local food efforts. But when 800-pound gorillas speak - even if perhaps without the greatest conviction - people listen.
Alltech and KFC are speaking "local" these days, and that's a good thing, even if their ideas of local and mine don't quite align. Maybe we need to enlist one of those interpreters I saw at the symposium.