National Pork Board hires new supply chain exec. Sep 9, 2026 DES MOINES, IOWA - The National Pork Board recently announced Kent Harrison, a meat industry and food manufacturing professional with more than 30 years of experience, as the new assistant vice president of channel marketing. Before joining NPB, Harrison worked at Trident Seafoods as senior vice president of US Value-Added. In the role, he led a major business unit responsible for $815 million in sales. He also spent more than 15 years working at Tyson Foods, including as vice president of marketing and premium programs, where he helped transform Tyson Fresh Meats into a premium, value-added business. He also founded Pro Max Consulting, where he advised clients on growth, value creation and new market opportunities. "Our market growth team is focused on understanding their businesses, identifying where pork can win and bringing the right expertise and resources together to turn those opportunities into incremental value and volume," said José de Jesús, vice president of market growth at NPB. "Kent's deep commercial experience strengthens our team and how we build partnerships that create growth across the supply chain on behalf of pork producers." As part of the checkoff organization, NPB looks to grow domestic demand for pork. A recent example is the Taste What Pork Can Do campaign, which provides channel partners with consumer-facing assets to show pork's versatility and use of more than 110 unique flavors. State pork associations will also work with local and regional retail and foodservice chains on digital and in-store promotions. "Protein-rich pork has an opportunity to claim its place with younger consumers," Harrison said. "Pork represents an ownable position of flavor and versatility that we can maximize through collaborating on category growth across the entire supply chain." Harrison's channel marketing team will work with Kiersten Hafter, vice president of business intelligence and innovation, who analyzes trends and consumer behavior for the supply chain and looks at business objectives. "Long-term demand starts with understanding today's consumer," Harrison continued. "We want to unlock the business potential of pork by providing channel partners with marketing and merchandising resources that build on the consumer power of the Taste What Pork Can Do campaign." Get better meat and poultry industry search results. Adding Meat+Poultry tells Google to prioritize MEAT+POULTRY stories.

Trident seafood working to break into new menu space with its Sauceable Nuggets. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based Trident Seafoods is aiming to break into new territory on restaurant menus with its Crispy Battered Sauceable Nuggets. Trident Seafoods President Jeff Welbourn told SeafoodSource the new offering, which won a Seafood Excellence Award, is the product of the hard work of the company's innovation team and is a way of differentiating its nuggets from existing seafood products. "Going after other seafood is a zero-sum game," Welbourn said. "We don't have enough things that play like chicken, and this is something that is durable enough, it has resilience." The new item is designed to be used in foodservice applications and was formulated with saucing in mind. Importantly, Trident Seafoods worked to make it more durable compared to other battered frozen seafood items, and it can withstand longer hold times in sauces without getting soggy or unappealing, the company said. Trident Seafoods Director of Corporate Research and Development Olga Semenovich told SeafoodSource a lot of the innovation was focused on making something truly different that could also be flavored in multiple ways when it gets to a restaurant. "Our goal is to help bring wild Alaskan seafood to market in different ways, but you can't just do it with flavor," she said. "Flavor trends come and go, they're short lived, so we were thinking about how to help creators have a variety of different applications out of just one product." Trident Seafoods was demonstrating those multiple applications during Seafood Expo North America. The company was offering samples of the sauceable nuggets throughout the event, constantly changing between flavorings like a Thai chili sauce or a Cajun dry rub to show off its versatility. "This way, they can buy only one product but they can change it, they can change the flavor profile, they can change the seasoning, they can add a sauce," Semenovich said. Welbourn and Semenovich said the company did a lot of product testing to make sure that it was what restaurants were looking for, but achieving a robust item wasn't easy. "It's difficult with fish, because fish has a lot of moisture inherently, which is difficult to keep inside it," Semenovich said. That internal moisture can ruin even more durable coatings, which limits seafood to food items that are served extremely fresh. "That tether that seafood has, historically, has been very close," Welbourn said. That shortcoming was especially evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, where restaurants were forced to create take-out heavy menus that often left out seafood because it couldn't hold up. Trident's sauceable nuggets, however, can survive the takeout container - or a longer stand time in a busy restaurant. "It checks a lot of boxes, because creating some distances between that prep time and the consumption time allows for versatility," Welbourn said. He added that the core goal at Trident is always to build the seafood industry's market share as a means of bringing value back to the fishing grounds in Alaska which provide the company its raw materials. "Our history and our foundation was built on commodities, the capture and stewardship of an incredible wild natural resource," Welbourn said. The sustainability of that fishery is about more than just ensuring the resource has robust stocks, it also means ensuring that the fishermen that rely on it can make a living economically. "We have to build the value proposition for consumers through our business partners, and this is an item that absolutely does that," Welbourn said. Executive Editor Chris Chase is the Portland, Maine-based executive editor of SeafoodSource. Previously, he worked covering local issues at the Coastal Journal in Bath, Maine, where he won multiple awards from the Maine Press Association for his news coverage and food reviews. Chris is a graduate of the University of Maine, and got his start in writing by serving as a reporter and later the State Editor of The Maine Campus, an award-winning campus newspaper.