Meat+Poultry - April 2020 - 56

COVER STORY

Collette Kaster is able
to perform both of
her jobs, as executive
director of PAACO and
CEO of AMSA, out of her
office in Kearney, Mo.

connection to have. He did such a great job of
introducing his students to the meat industry."
After receiving her master's, it was time to
settle on a job.
"I always thought I would end up working
in beef," she said. "Instead I ended up seeing
a job ad for PIC. They were looking to hire a
meat scientist for the first time in their history."
In 1992, Kaster moved to Spring Green,
Wis., to start her meat industry career as a
meat scientist for PIC.
"It couldn't have been any better of a dream
first job," she said. "It was an international
company. I got to go overseas for the first
time. I interacted with producers, with packers. It was tremendous exposure to the global
pork industry."

EVOLVING ROLES
Kaster's time at PIC not only introduced her to
the pork industry but also to her future husband.

MEAT+ POULTRY | 04.20 | www.meatpoultry.com

"Friends of ours say it was 'a match made
in hog heaven,'" she said.
After marrying Dennis Kaster in Wisconsin,
the two moved to Trenton, Mo., in 1994, to
work for the newly formed Premium Standard
Farms in Milan, Mo. Kaster went to work at
the plant first as director of technical services and later as vice president of technical
services. Her husband also worked in management roles in live production at Premium
Standard Farms, and they often worked
together on issues such as optimum live
weight and genetic evaluations.
"One of the things during my whole career
is that I've always worked on the interface of
live and fresh," she said. "At PIC, I would follow the pigs through the process trying to find
out how the genetics affected them. How did
what we fed them, their genotype, affect them?
How did everything affect what was happening
at the plant - how did it affect quality or cutability or food safety?"
Kaster pursued many of those same questions during her time with Premium Standard
Farms. It was then that her career started
to evolve more into the areas of food safety,
quality assurance and product development in
various technical services roles.
"I always tell students that I mentor, 'you
don't have to know everything, but you should
be one of the hardest workers," she said. "You
should be willing to be there at 4 in the morning and stay until 8 at night, even if you're a
manager with a master's degree. I tell them to
always ask for more to do at your job.
"One of the things I like to do is learn a lot
about a lot of things. I'm a big nerd about learning things. For me, learning the next thing in a
job is fascinating."
The quest for learning and taking on new
challenges kept her career evolving after
Smithfield, Va.-based Smithfield Foods bought
Premium Standard Farms in 2007. Following
that acquisition, some elements of the business
went to Farmland Foods and others stayed with
Smithfield. Kaster worked as vice president of
quality assurance and technical services for
Farmland from 2007 to 2012 and then as senior
vice president of hog procurement and quality
assurance for Smithfield from 2012 to 2016.
She spent 24 years of her career working in
meat plants at PIC, Premium Standard Farms,
Farmland and Smithfield.

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Meat+Poultry - April 2020

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