New Organization to Represent Women in the Meat Industry

New Organization to Represent Women in the Meat Industry

The meat industry welcomes a new organization formed by women, representing women. The Women's Meat Industry Network serves to connect women in the industry to mentors and growth opportunities from entry level to the C-suite.

The U.S. Meat Export Federation’s own Export Services Director Cheyenne McEndaffer is co-founder of WMIN. The meat industry, like many others, has seen women primarily work in specific roles such as marketing or human resources.

Although launched earlier this year, McEndaffer says the organization has been two years in the making… with one primary focus being professional development.

“There's two tiers there are is there technical trainings that we can offer. We have amazing Intel already in our 500 plus membership that we can pull from, you know, this could be a maintenance one on one, but this could also be things like return to work, virtual exhaustion, negotiating a raise . Mentoring is also going to be a huge focus of what we're doing, not only from the top down, but also reverse mentoring, because we really see getting that feedback back to leadership on the things that are working or not working in a company as beneficial for employee retention, which is something every industry is struggling with. And then lastly, it would be networking, which again is building out this community.”

This USMEF report highlights the under representation of talent for technical roles due to the lack of training and education offered in the U.S.

“With our land grant system in the U.S., we have the best meat science university programs in the world, and we have amazing talent coming out of those programs. And if you look at these programs, from a demographic, I would say at least half or a majority of those programs are women. But then when you get into certain sectors of our industry, they're not there. I don't know where they went. What are the misconceptions and the actual perceptions and hurdles we can address to attract and retain talent into what we see is an amazing industry to be a part of?”

The organization is targeted to those in all sectors of the meat industry, and is not limited to women. More about WMIN and their mentoring, professional development and networking opportunities is available at www.WMIN.org.

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