The corporate identity that organized the portfolio.
Tyson Fresh Meats had nearly a dozen brands and no idea what to call itself. I gave it a mission statement, and built the work that organized everything underneath.
Tyson Foods bought IBP in September 2001. Fourteen years later, the wound from that acquisition still hadn't healed.
"Chicken people" buying a beef and pork operation didn't sit well with the IBP holdovers. They wore IBP polos. They introduced themselves as "IBP guys." They never accepted Tyson Corporate as authority.
I joined Midan in late 2014 as a copywriter on the account. Campaigns, packaging, websites, brand standards, corporate communications, and an endless deluge of sell sheets.
By 2017, the portfolio had grown to nearly a dozen brands. None of them belonged to something bigger.
Sales sheets ran as endless scrolls of bullets with zero "so what?" for the intended audience.
The commodity guys were trying to move boxed beef and pork. Web pages went nowhere. The right hand and the left hand kept colliding in the dark.
This wasn't nostalgia. It was unresolved injury.
The marketing team worked the way marketing teams work. They asked for materials. We built them. The materials went to the sales organization.
That's where it fell apart.
The sales reps were career meat guys. Most had come up under IBP, pitching beef and pork the same way for thirty years. They did what they'd always done. The materials made it as far as the trash can.
I named the problem in the room: the brands weren't broken. Tyson Fresh Meats had no identity holding them together.
The company needed a mission statement that gave the people working there permission to belong to something that wasn't Tyson Corporate, without asking them to give up being IBP.
A corporate identity, not another brand.
Something that lived above the products and explained who they were as a company.
My first attempt was The Beef & Pork Company. Too clinical. It lasted a month.
The second attempt landed: The Beef & Pork Experts.
Once the corporate identity existed, every brand had a parent to belong to. Campaigns first. Everything else flowed from there.
Under The Beef & Pork Experts, I led campaigns and brand work across the full Tyson Fresh Meats portfolio: eight retail brands and a foodservice operation with its own identity.
The IBP holdovers adopted the identity. Not as surrender — as recognition that for the first time in fourteen years, someone had given them a name for what they actually did.
Tyson Blue showed up across the operation in a way it hadn't before. Not as begrudging compliance with corporate.
Conference takeovers. Environmental advertising. Booth design built around the line.
By 2020, the work was stable enough to carry long-form video: a five-minute Brand Solutions Pillars film and a Farm-to-Fork piece.
The identity got built out at scale for the Annual Meat Conference. Booth design, signage, the whole brand presence on the trade floor.
The identity rolled out as signage across Tyson processing facilities. It became how Tyson thanked the workers on the floor for what they'd done through and after COVID.
The plant-floor signage didn't show the product. It showed who the product was for.
What the workers on the line do today becomes a meal in someone's hand tomorrow. For a family they will never meet. For a pregnancy they'll never know about. For a kid they'll never see grow up.
The signage put the workers face to face with the people their work was actually feeding.
The identity supported the launch of an internal Tyson podcast. I created, produced, and edited the series.
Org charts change the way they always do.
The Beef & Pork Experts ran for six years before Tyson Corporate consolidated and pulled the division back to Springdale.
That's a long run for any corporate identity. It's a longer one for an identity built inside a company that didn't know what to call itself when I walked in.