Lucio Tan group gears up for battle over corned beef market in Luzon

The Lucio Tan group is gearing up for a major battle in a new field as it is set to launch a P60-million advertising campaign for its newly-acquired processed meat brands.

Tan’s Foremost Farms, the country’s leading livestock company, will soon embark on a nationwide multimedia campaign to promote its latest food line, the Winner brand of corned beef.

Foremost acquired the Winner and El Rancho corned beef brands when it bought the Cebu-based Virginia Food Corp. from the Chiongbians for P300 million this year. Both brands are market leaders in the Visayas and Mindanao areas but have yet to make an impact in the bigger Luzon market.

According to industry estimates, the corned beef market alone accounts for P6 billion in nationwide sales. Among the leading players in this field are Pacific Meat Co. Inc. of the Po family, Purefoods Corp. and Swift Foods.

Sources said a big chunk of the advertising budget is for the talent fee of local singer/actress Sharon Cuneta, acknowledged by the advertising industry as the top product endorser in the market at the moment.

Cuneta, who will be paid between P10 to P20 million, will soon appear in the Winner ads in Metro Manila. For its initial thrust, flyers and posters of the megastar have been circulating in Cebu.

Foremost will use Winner ads featuring Sharon in a P50 to P60 million multimedia campaign against Argentina, said to account for half of the P6 billion per year corned beef market.

The ad will directly pit Winner against the Argentina brand of Pacific Meat Co., whose main endorser is another noted local actor Aga Muhlach.

With the fold in of Virginia Foods, the Tan group has gained a strong foothold in the processed meat business in the south. With the main Luzon market to fill in the gap, sources said Tan has dug into his war chest to acquire Swift Foods from the Concepcions of RFM Corp., which the same soures said was already a done deal despite reports the RFM Group has offered Swift to San Miguel Corp.

Tan’s strong interest in acquising Swift, the sourcess said, is aimed at challenging SMC head-to-head in all aspects of the agribusiness front – from farming to processing, especially since Foremost lost a major client with SMC’s acquisition of Pure Foods Corp. last May.

SMC also has a strong presence in livestock and meat processing through the San Miguel Food Group (San Miguel Foods Inc., Monterey Foods, SMC Campofrio and Pure Foods).