Hello all. Welcome to WFHR's Rapids report for this April 30th, 2025. Have your host James
here. We're joined by our great friend, Caitlin Riley from the Wisconsin Beef Council.
Caitlin, it's been a little while. How are you doing?
It has been, and I am doing great. You know, spring has sprung, and so it's been really
fun to see a lot of folks firing up their grills and getting excited for May beef month.
Yeah, because while it is, we do still have this last day of April. I can tell you that
people like my father are already in May. They're all mentally already in May. My dad loves
May, loves beef, loves they celebrating the month. And I know so many of our fellow Wisconsinites
out there really enjoy this. And the Wisconsin Beef Council is really going all in. They're
really hitting the accelerator when it comes to the beef month, this go around.
We really are. And we want everyone to be part of the celebration, whether you are a beef farmer,
a beef lover, or if you're just someone out there in between, you know, we have almost 23,000
farms and ranches in Wisconsin that raise cattle and calves. We are America's dairy land,
but we know that both our dairy industry and the beef industry play a really important role
in providing protein for our families and even for our social gatherings that we might enjoy.
And so one of the fun ways and easiest ways I think that you can celebrate May beef month is when
you stop by a local quick trip to pay attention to those fuel pumps and even those in-store displays
because we are going to have some advertisements on there celebrating beef nutritious qualities
and also giving folks a chance to win away from them to cook up their beef. So we are working with
pitboss to give away a pitboss navigator 850 connected grill. James, I'm not the cook. So a lot of
that goes over my head, but when my husband heard that we were giving this away, he was pretty darn
excited about it. And you could either if you are a quick trip lover, use your quick rewards app
to use your visits as a chance to enter into this. But if you want even more entries because you
really want this pitboss to be part of your summer barbecue cookouts, then what you can do is walk
into the store and make a fresh beef purchase. So you can buy some steaks or some ground beef
and those will give you even more opportunities to enter and win. So we're really excited to have
folks visit their local quick trip be thinking about beef farmers and ranchers and probably be
thinking about dinner while they're fueling up at the gas pump. Oh, I apologize, Caitlin. I'm sorry,
I was distracted by this pitboss. This thing is amazing. It really is a great grill. It's a nice one.
And it's great to see just as a side note, quick trip and the beef council working together.
We know how much we love quick trip, how popular they are. And it's a great, it's a natural fit
between the two. So I really do enjoy seeing that. And these, the beef benefits, the kind of like
added bonus to this of putting out there and getting that information more and more out there.
It's really a big part of the job, isn't it? It really is. We know that there are some misconceptions
out there about the role that beef can play in a nutritious diet. And we know that a simple
serving of beef, that's only three ounces. I know it doesn't seem like a lot, but because beef is
so great tasting, I would be more than my serving size of it. But that simple three ounce serving
gives you 25 grams of protein, 10 essential nutrients and about 170 calories, depending on the cut
of beef that you are using. So you really do get good bang for your buck. And I encourage folks
to be looking at those nutritionals and looking at those labels when you're making decisions about
what to prepare for yourself and for your family. We, I recently have the opportunity to chat
at the Wisconsin Nurses Association conference. And we had materials there about ways that beef can
play in role of diets of all folks who may be frequently visiting their doctors or nurses for
various health concerns, whether it's living with diabetes or maybe their concern of our heart
health. Beef can play a role in those diets and can play a positive role. In fact, in our website,
we have a whole list of recipes certified by the American Heart Association that are great ways
to continue eating and enjoying what we love, continue getting that nutritious protein and maintain
those healthy lifestyle. And so we're really excited to be able to share those work with, like you
said, quick trip to be able to get that nutrition information out there. It's kind of funny when we
were sharing with our fellow beef councils, because like they're the Wisconsin beef council,
but you know, there's an Iowa in Minnesota. And we were sharing with them that we were working with
one or more popular gas stations to do this. And some of them kind of give us a quizzical look
and we said, oh, no, you don't understand. What? Quick trip. Yeah, yeah. And the popularity, they're
they're fantastic. So we're excited to try to reach a new audience with this messaging and
really get this information out there. And if folks are interested, we're actually compiling
a recipe that were featured in those pump videos. So when you're fueling up at the gas pump in
May and you see the video that's going to be beautiful tenderloin and steaks on a pit-boss grill
and you might be thinking, I want to make that. If you go to beeftips.com, backslash quick trip,
you'll be able to find the recipes that we incorporated. This is some a little background
fodder in those videos. You know, Caitlin and I have been talking for a while. And one of the things
that I brought up many times is my father and how much he loves to grill. This year, I would
say it was January 30th or 20th or somewhere in between there. He was grilling. It's,
this man just, he's non-stop griller. He loves the grill and he loves to show his love of
grilling and his love of beef. And my dad's not alone. I know there's plenty of you out there
that can do that and we're encouraging you at the beef council to show your love for beef in a month
of May. That's right. And you can do it in an easy way. Put it right on your shirt because we
are actually selling some exclusive fueled by beef shirts and they come with a really good
cause too. We did this fundraiser last year with a different design. We're going to try to
shake it up each year. But the proceeds from these shirt sales are going to benefit feeding
Wisconsin. So for those who may not be familiar, feeding Wisconsin helps supply beef to families
in need in more than 1000 local food programs. And so that's why we decided to partner that
organization to spread the love all across the state. And we are going to present them with the
check once we have those shirt sales come through to help them purchase that beef. We know a lot
of our pantries are grateful and graciously receive a lot of non-perishable food items,
which is fantastic for helping meet those hunger needs. But we do know that beef, as we said before,
plays a really important role in nutrition diets. We know that we have women and adolescents
that are falling short on their iron levels. We know that infants and toddlers up to teenagers
are really going through rapid growth and they need this nutrition to not only build their bodies
but also their minds so that they can continue developing into successful adults. So if there are
any families out there that are feeling that financial pinch, we want to help in any way that we can.
And you can do so too. Now through May 15th, we're going to have these shirts available. You can
find them at beeftips.com slash beating Wisconsin. Still playing on that fueled by beef message
that we're doing with quick trip. It's a simple design that says that fueled by beef and has a nice
stake on a fork and our Wisconsin beef council logo. We're hoping that we can surpass the number
of shirts that we filled last year and make an even greater contribution last year. We had about
a $1,200 contribution. So looking to extend that and it's been really heartwarming to see the
support that's come through all across the state as those short orders come in. These shirts are
really cool looking. I love the design and the colors in them and the options that people have for
that alone is a great reason to get them and certainly the support that you show to the
the beef council is important. But the other part of this is such a key part that Caitlin's bringing up
as we have gotten to understand and know a lot more about beef. It's I think on all of us that
love this great food and everything it's given to us to spread the word about it and the
positives of it and everything and not to say for lack of a better word to kind of correct some
of the news of the old and being able to support that. It's all for all those reasons it's good
but you're also the underlying thing that I always think of with this whenever we get together
Caitlin is how much this supports our ag industry, our farmers, the backbone of our country and
certainly the backbone of our state. Absolutely and there's a big ripple of fact when we see that
you know we know that raising beef starts with our farmers and as we said at the beginning of
this conversation James there's about 23,000 farms and ranches in Wisconsin with cattle and calves.
They work closely with folks within their local community providing additional jobs whether it's
the individual they're selling or purchasing feed from to feed their cattle or maybe it's even the
local veterinarian that comes out. Some of our farmers are working with their local natural
resources groups and even helping preserve our public lands by having cattle grays on those
pastures making them better for hikers and their hunters that are wanting to naturally preserve the
wildlife that are out there we have our more than 500 licensed meat establishments and 68 counties
of the state and that livestock and meat industry alone employs more than 43,000 people and that's
a $34 billion economic impact to Wisconsin's economy and that's according to Wisconsin Department
of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection so we really do see this large ripple effect like
I said from our farmers to the folks they work with our retailers our processors even our consumers
I mean it impacts more than just the individual that's out there feeding the cows.
Well said and you can get you can add your wardrobe and get one of these cool shirts at beeftips.com
slash feeding Wisconsin beeftips.com slash feeding Wisconsin and Caitlin there are even more ways
that people can celebrate may be if month. That's right we talked about visiting those more than
500 licensed meat establishments James there's probably folks like your dad out there who have
grilled anything under the sun but if you're someone who is maybe stuck with their traditional burger
or ribeye because you know that's what you like we really encourage you to chat with your local
meat counter whether it's the grocery store or one of those local meat processors and ask them for
their recommendations say hey I want to try something new that I know will please the family it's
hard to go wrong with any kind of beef as long as you know whether or not it needs to be marinated if
it's a little bit more of a lean cut or if it's ready be put right on the grill if it has a little
bit more of that marbling into it but we just encourage you to get your eyes open across the
entire animal to know what some new cuts might be out there and you might even find that there's
something a little bit more cost effective for your family that you have not tried before we have
a steak swap guide also on our website beeftips.com where maybe if you're itching for a ribeye but you
don't have one in your freezer and your wallet says maybe go with a sirloin instead you know we
have those options there for you to give positive substitutions because beef really is versatile so
there's a lot of different ways that you can cook it and prepare it and still have that consistent
delicious eating experience so we encourage you to go out and try those if you're not feeling up
to cooking we can also get you out there to some of our best burger contest winners so we had our
best burger contest the first one last year and it went gangbusters it was so much fun to see the
amount of a burger locations that were quickly filling out of their products we even recently saw
in social media that one of the candidates put on there that they actually had to close early because
saw that yeah walking to try their burger it's great that's always so positive to see and so
this year we have our elite eight and they are and I know we need to get some up there in that
Wisconsin Rapids area so hopefully our third burger contest will be the charm we have the 11-11
burgers in Fondalac brazen head pub in West Bend the iron horse saloon in Hurley that's a little bit
farther north for you guys there the straight home bar in grill in Eland brothers on oak in bearaboo
the local press burger bar in Huaskam minne's charcoal grill in Manasha and the dump bar in grill
in Cambria if three of those names sound familiar that's because they are back again they were
nominated to be in the elite eight we recently had our judges travel across the state and they
tried and evaluated each of these burgers and James one thing that I want to point out is that
we keep these judges a secret when they walk through the doors for a reason because we want to
make sure that they are getting the same quality of service and burger that any customer who walks
through the door at any time is getting so they're truly being put to the test to see who has
the best burger and we will be making that announcement on May 1st so we have the results in
we're anxiously waiting to be able to make that announcement of who that winner is and if folks
want to visit those locations or if they want to keep up with who that is they can once again I
said our website a lot beeftips.com but also kept us on social media you can find us on Facebook
Instagram Twitter we're even on a TikTok and also on Pinterest so please check us out keep up
with our local events and join us in celebrating our best burger contest winner right away in May 1st
there's so many good ones to try everybody encourage you to go down the list have your own just
you know burger tour and and going to each and every one of these locations there's no downside
you're going to get a great burger and you're supporting a local business it's a win-win kind of
thing right there. Caitlin before we let you go is there any other events you wanted to touch on?
I think we just want to let folks know that throughout May there is going to be a lot of different
celebrations not only from the beef council but also within your local community so we know that we
have some different cattle organizations and groups spread across the state that are going to be
hosting steak fries and burger events and we'll try to keep those updated on our website as well
keep your ears tuned to those happening in your local communities we are going to be on the
ground level bringing out some different restaurant groups to be able to tour our beef farm in the
state of Wisconsin and if any of your folks are driving down to Madison for the run mad town event
we will also be hosting a free farm tour for race participants so if you're one of those who comes
down to South Central Wisconsin feel free to join us hop on the bus and we'll take you out to one
of those beef farms that we've been bragging so much about and rightfully so because of all the hard
work and dedication that they have to not only caring for their animals but the land that they're
working on. Again well said Caitlin and always great talking with you if people have follow up
questions they'd like to know more how can they reach you. They can contact us at wbc at beeftips.com
so wbc for Wisconsin beef council and if they go to our website on the about us page there's
some contact information there for all of our staff members there's only four of us here but we're
continuously responding to those emails so you can find myself our executive director Tammy our
director of compliance and producer outreach grace or our director of marketing as we finally
call her the beef lady who goes around and does a lot of our recipe segments Angie. And keep in mind
that website beeftips.com you want to bookmark that and keep in mind that that is there for you
anytime you need whether it's beef may beef month or any other time and we're looking forward to
hanging out with you again real soon Caitlin say hi to everybody for us over there at the beef
council and you take care we'll talk again real soon. That sounds great thanks James.
Okay well a more rapid support available for you streaming exclusively right here at wfhr.com
