SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – This year should be another profitable one for pork producers, according to the CEO of the National Pork Board (NPB). “It’s a great time to be in the pork business,” said NPB’s Dr. David Newman, who was invited to speak to Illinois pig farmers during the annual meeting of the Illinois Pork Producers Association (IPPA) on Feb. 17 at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. 

Newman discussed a variety of ways the NPB, which is the pork industry’s marketing arm, spends producers’ pork checkoff dollars. This includes NPB’s new marketing strategy involving social media and internet “influencers” to reach a younger generation of consumers. Debuting in 2025, the checkoff-funded “Taste What Pork Can Do” campaign has provided a $29 to $1 retail advertisement investment return to date, he said.

“We launched this campaign just after last year’s National Pork Forum (in May), so we are not quite one year in,” said Newman, who leads pork checkoff promotion, research and education programs for the NPB on behalf of the nation’s estimated 60,000 pork producers. “Domestic demand has been strong, and our incremental return on ad-spend in the marketing space is currently 29-to-1. That means that for every dollar we are investing in national checkoff money we can account through an actual sale that we are selling $29 worth of pork. That’s a really good number; a (return on advertising investment) is typically a 1-to-3 or a 1-to-4.”

Newman indicated he is optimistic for another year of good returns for pig farmers and affordable prices for consumers in 2026, calling it a chance for producers to “catch up” with below-breakeven years from as recently as 2022-2023. In addition, 2026 presents a unique marketing opportunity for pork with the recent Make America Healthy Again (MAHA)-driven push for more proteins.

“When you take into account what’s happening with the MAHA strategy and dietary guidelines, there is a tremendous opportunity here in front of us. School lunch programs are going to continue to be huge, and we are going to put a big emphasis on that in 2026 not only with what’s happening in Chicago (where the IPPA is working to repeal a pork ban in Chicago Public Schools) but around the rest of the country in getting these products in schools,” Newman said.

He also tackled the subject of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, such as Ozempic, whose users are reshaping the pork market through increased demand for healthier, leaner and more sustainable proteins.

“We’re going to prioritize the work we are doing with our human nutrition team at NPB,” Newman said. “The GLP-1 weight loss drug movement is such a huge opportunity for pork right now. Two or three years ago we thought that was going to be something potentially catastrophic to the business, but the reality is that it’s a huge opportunity for (pork’s) nutrient density.”

Growth in multicultural sales of pork will also be a priority of NPB marketers in 2026, Newman continued: “85 percent of the population growth over the next 30 years is going to be mostly Hispanic and African American. In 2026, you’re going to see us launch a new Hispanic brand that is in parallel with the Taste What Pork Can Do brand campaign. We’ll be putting a stronger emphasis on the multicultural market which, if you look at only Hispanic, has a $4.2 trillion economic impact on the United States. We’ve got to make sure we double down.”

NPB’s swine health strategy team has been spending the last year “pooling results” from surveys to determine endemic and trans-boundary (foreign) animal disease concerns of pig farmers. Not surprisingly, the top concern of producers was Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) and how to eradicate it.

“There is a massive opportunity to improve on endemic diseases that cost our producers billions of dollars. There is not a single day that goes by that I do not visit with a producer who tells me about a different strain of PRRS they are dealing with, so I know the challenge is real,” said Newman, who is owner of his family’s farming operation, Newman Farm Heritage Berkshire Pork. “When you boil down what our national swine health strategy group has put together and is going to focus on at the National Pork Industry Forum (March 4-6 in Kansas City), we need to continue to focus on keeping foreign animal diseases (FADs) out. I think that’s something we can all agree on, but when we think about PRRS and some of the other things we’ve dealt with in the last 20 years, it continues to plague us.

“It cannot be just about doing more research. After spending tens of millions of dollars over the last 40 years on PRRS research and endemic diseases, we’ve got to start thinking in terms of elimination. We’re working with our partners at NPPC (National Pork Producers Council) and our partners at the Swine Health Information Center, and the American Association of Swine Health Veterinarians. We continue to work with state pork associations and state animal health officials.”