10/15/07 Product of the Year

Product of the Year. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Ethanol has been given what amounts to a seal of approval after being named AgriMarketing magazines 2007 Product of the Year. Tom Slunecka, executive director of the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council says ethanol is quickly becoming very recognized. SLUNECKA: AgriMarketing's Product of the Year was given to ethanol and the E brand that was created by the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council. That brand has been under development for the last 3 years since the association was formed and we're now at a threshold across the Midwest and much of the country to where ethanol is becoming a recognized brand and consumers are choosing it based on it's attributes as opposed to what it did for their price. Ethanol is used as an additive to gasoline that burns cleaner and can be mixed from 10 to 100% but is most common as E85 or 85% ethanol. According to Slunecka, the use of ethanol is crucial to sustaining our fuel needs. SLUNECKA: We promote ethanol as a whole and that constitutes all the various blends that you get ethanol so actually 52% of all the gas in America has an ethanol blend in it and of course when this country uses well over 250 billion gallons of gasoline every year so that would mean if we had a 10% blend across this country that would be 15 million gallons but we still have a long way to go to reach that number, that constitutes less than 4% on a volume basis. According to Slunecka, you may already be using ethanol. SLUNECKA: So what we're trying to do through the branding effort is we're trying to let consumers know that "A", they are using the product, they can trust it  they've probably been using it for a long time and so as more and more of it comes available it's not anything to be afraid of. To date there are 23 states in the nation that have approved the E label and we are sending out labels as fast as we can, we have 20-thousand gas stations in the country that have been branded with ethanol with this new E label and of course there are a lot of others that have been branded with other styles of labels. So what does being named Product of the Year do for ethanol? SLUNECKA: You know ethanol started in agriculture and it'll always have it's roots in agriculture and so to receive this recognition is extremely important for the effort. It validates the vision that was started some 3 ½ years ago; it validates the investment of our now over 150 dues paying members. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.