The Meat Industry Hall of Fame has announced that famed journalist and award-winning broadcaster Bill Kurtis will be the keynote speaker at our annual Induction Ceremony and Dinner on November 3 at The Drake Hotel in Chicago. Kurtis, a legendary news anchor and foreign reporter, has worked for the award winning program CBS Reports and co-hosted the CBS Morning News.

After anchoring the news for Chicago’s WBBM-TV, he left traditional television reporting to start his own production company, making a variety of programs for A & E Television Network.  Several years ago, he founded Tallgrass Beef in his home state of Kansas, raising grass fed cattle and supplying meat to some of the top restaurants and supermarkets around the country.

This will be Kurtis’ third keynote address, which is becoming a Hall of Fame tradition when the Induction Ceremony is scheduled in Chicago. Past speakers have included Rosemary Mucklow, Director Emeritus of the North American Meat Association and Temple Grandin, a member of the Hall of Fame Inaugural Class of 2009 and well-known animal behavior consultant to the livestock industry.

The Induction Ceremony will honor these six distinguished members of the Class of 2013:

BARRY CARPENTER, CEO of the North American Meat Association.

MICHAEL E. DIKEMAN, PH.D., Professor of Meat Science, Sciences, Kansas State University; past president of the American Meat Science Association and the Federation of American Societies of Food Animal Sciences.

SHELDON LAVIN, Chairman and CEO of OSI Group, LLC, a global supplier of top quality meat products for many of the world’s leading foodservice and retail brands.

TOM PIERSON, PH.D., Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University and a pioneer in analyzing effective retail marketing and merchandising programs for value-added meat and poultry products.

JAMES “BO” REAGAN, PH.D., Recently retired Vice President of the NCBA Research and Knowledge Management Center and an expert on beef quality and safety and cattle genomics.

ROGER REISER, President of Reiser, a leading food industry equipment manufacturer, and a strong proponent of advancing product quality and value through leading-edge technologies in processing and packaging.

A reception, co-hosted by the North American Meat Association and the Meat Importers Council of America, will begin at 5:30 pm.  The Induction Ceremony and Dinner will begin at 6:30.  Tickets are available from the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.  For more information about the event or how your company can help support the Hall, contact Chuck Jolley at Chuck@MeatIndustryHallofFame.com or +1 913.205.3791.

Source: Meat Industry Hall of Fame