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Angus Productions Inc.

October 20, 2010

Beef Culinary Center
Busy Creating New Recipes

Chef Dave ZinoExecutive Chef Dave Zino has spent the past nine and a half years creating recipes for the beef checkoff. This past fiscal year, the culinary team of experts has created an astounding 80 new recipes for all checkoff program areas (e.g., nutrition, public relations, veal, foodservice, new products). When the Healthy Beef Cookbook was released, that number was much higher, but on average, 75 to 80 new beef recipes are generated each year.

The basic culinary function is to support the checkoff and its program areas. For instance, the checkoff hosted a "Live Well" Event this past June in an effort to engage and mobilize top-tier health professionals and credentialed members of the nutrition media, providing them with new research and tools to incorporate beef nutrition information into their education efforts. As a result of that event, nutrition influencers expressed the need to have more breakfast beef items. Thus, the genesis of some of Zino's most recent work.

Providing health professional's clients with more options, Zino and the culinary team went to work to develop six new recipes for breakfast beef. Such concepts include a breakfast burrito (a recipe that is frozen and microwaved for a quick and easy breakfast); make once, dine twice breakfast sandwiches (grilled steaks make great leftovers for a breakfast sandwich); a beef and sweet potato enchilada; a homemade beef sausage for breakfast pizza and a beef turnover.

"Breakfast is a day part we don't normally think of for beef as an option," says Zino. "With Burger King introducing nine new breakfast items, we knew we were on the right track with these concepts."

Over the years, the checkoff has created a database of recipes that serves as a great history to springboard ideas off of and change them to fit the current environment's needs. The concept is then taken into the kitchen for testing, tasting, double-checking by another tester who acts like the consumer and follows the recipe as written, then sent to the program managers for a formal taste test. Lastly, the recipe is written and edited, a nutritional analysis is done, and in some cases, the dish is photographed.

"Our recipe-writing style is very well-respected within the food community," Dave adds. "It comes down to ingredient order and method order according to what consumers are asking for. This makes for an efficient process where we maximize producer's checkoff dollars."

comment on this storyZino's team remains focused on streamlined, straightforward recipe development. He says his epiphany was the Healthy Beef Cookbook, where he learned how to develop healthy recipes that are still flavorful.

"There are so many opportunities on the horizon, we just need to capture what the consumer wants and put it on a recipe card," Zino says. "Beef and new recipes are always top-of-mind. I just hope my work inspires people to love their kitchen and the food that they can create."

You can tap into Dave's recipes by signing up for the Beef So Simple e-newsletter, follow Dave on Twitter or find him on Facebook (search for Dave Zino).

For more information about your beef checkoff investment in new products, visit www.MyBeefCheckoff.com or www.BeefInnovationsGroup.com.



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