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2-12-2025
Big Picture Report: February 2025
Bernadette Wiltz-Lang, SUSTA
Our 2025 program year is underway! While February is the shortest month of the year, it is shaping up to be a busy one with SUSTA's Global Events. SUSTA is particularly happy to announce that the funds awarded SUSTA under the Regional Agricultural Promotion Program, also known as RAPP will help southern companies open new markets. SUSTA’s presence at Food & Drink Malaysia is an example of a RAPP event that targets a new market (we still have a booth available if you’re interested!).
Our strategy is simple, to help our Southern U.S. companies diversify into new growth markets. These are all regions where SUSTA companies have seen success in recent years, and this new program will help support continued growth. RAPP aims to diversify and expand market opportunities for U.S. food and agricultural products beyond the traditional top customers, by focusing on new markets in parts of the world – including South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and others – where the middle class is growing and the desire for high-quality food and farm products is increasing.
I also want to take this opportunity to remind everyone how important our activity surveys are. The information we receive from these evaluations is critical to effective management of our portfolio.
Allow me to go over the process. For Global Events, at the end of each activity you’re asked to fill out a survey that has some basic information which helps us evaluate the activity. We ask questions like how many new products you introduced, what category do they fall in, and how did SUSTA and our State Departments of Agriculture do in planning and managing the activity.
We also want to know how many contacts you made and how many you consider to be quality contacts, and your rating of the activity overall. These are benchmarks of the quality of the event that help us determine if it is a good fit for our participants and SUSTA’s overall strategy.
Then, six months after an event you’ll be asked to complete a follow-up survey about the sales you made because of participating in a SUSTA activity. These follow-up surveys are crucial to determining the return on investment of our program budgets. For those of you who participated in Global Events activities in the second half of 2024, please be sure to complete our six-month follow-up survey when it comes. If you’ve already done so, thank you very much. If you haven’t replied to a follow-up survey from an activity earlier in 2024, please do so – it’s not too late.
These surveys are where SUSTA gets the final sales volumes to report back to USDA to measure the impact of trade promotion investments. According to USDA analysis, for every $1 invested in export market development across all products and commodities, exports are increased by $24.50, a return that makes investments like RAPP focused on new growth markets worthwhile.
For those of you in the 50% CostShare program, there is one year-end survey. Those are available and, again, we ask you to please complete them.
As the saying goes, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure” and SUSTA is here for the sole purpose of helping improve your export marketing!
