Happy New Year! Welcome to the start of a new year and a new era with The National Provisioner.

In a few months, I will celebrate my third anniversary working with the real stars of our brand: our editors, Andy Hanacek and Sam Gazdziak, their editorial board of industry experts and meat scientists, our sales and marketing teams and, of course, the most important people — you, our readers.

Thank you for reading and responding to the articles and reports The National Provisioner and Independent Processor have offered you over the last 12 months, whether that was through the magazine, digital editions, Web site, Provisioner Prime eNewsletter, mobile app, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Whichever delivery format you choose, The National Provisioner’s goal is to be there for you anytime, anywhere with the best information to help you most.

With that goal in mind, here a few things you will see in the coming months.

This April will mark the introduction of our annual “Food Safety Meat & Poultry Processing Benchmark Survey”, which will serve as the foundation to the 2015 Food Safety Report. This study will provide you with a benchmark of industry food-safety practices, from slaughter through raw processing (intact and ground) on to cooked/ready to eat and pack-off (shelf stable and not shelf stable), including standard sanitization operating procedures, HACCP, traceability and recall plans, among others. We expect that the survey will serve as a valuable gauge to measure how your operations’ practices compare.

You can look forward to seeing more video interviews on ProvisionerTV with the executives that lead the innovative processors featured in The National Provisioner andIndependent Processor. This year, we will be working hard to make these videos much easier for you to find and view — new videos will be available on ProvisionerOnline.com and the Provisioner Mobile app, promoted in the Provisioner PrimeeNewsletter, linked in the digital edition of the magazines and announced by e-mail as soon as the video is available.

Later in the year, ProvisionerOnline.com will adopt a new mobile responsive design, giving you a better experience when viewing articles from your smartphone or tablet. In doing so, we hope your experience with our online content is more productive and gives you yet another way to engage with The National Provisioner’s articles — anytime, anywhere you choose.

Here’s to your mutual success in 2015 and thank you for inviting our brand into your workday.

 

Best regards,

Scott Seltz