Food and Agribusiness Marketing and Management major

This course engages students in learning and critical thinking about a variety of pressing issues, such as natural resource management, environmental protection, and poverty alleviation in a regional, national, and international context. Instructors integrate natural science, economics, ethics, and policy to improve the wellbeing of people and the environment. Instructors encourage students to think critically about these issues by applying basic policy and economic analysis, considering the ethical dimensions of policy, and assessing indicators of environmental quality and human welfare. Students tackle projects related to sustainability, resilience, and climate change.

This course provides a foundation of retailing management and strategy, which inherently involves exploring consumer behavior. Instructors cover the many facets of the food value chain to broadly understand challenges and opportunities of retailing food products. Additionally, students discuss the factors and behavioral responses that affect food choice. Students learn and apply basic concepts and key terms and  complexities and strategies of retail management. Students learn to create a retail strategy and evaluate the dynamics of maintaining a value proposition to remain competitive in the marketplace.

Instructors introduce the economic explanations for new technologies and the way economists view innovation and adoption of new products and techniques. The course moves on to a description of biotechnology and issues from consumer acceptance to government regulations to trade. Students explore risk assessment, intellectual property rights and differences in developing countries. Along the way, other technologies with the potential for significant impacts on agribusiness or beyond are discussed.

This course equips students with social sciences research skills focused on consumer behavior and resource management issues. They’ll learn techniques such as surveys, lab, and field experiments, as well as how to design and conduct research experiments and report results. The course emphasizes data issues, data analysis, and modeling techniques such as graphical methods, inference and multiple regression.

Students develop marketing plans, pitching the plan in local and national competitions. The primary objective is to prepare for the student competition at the National Agri-Marketing Association Conference. Students enrolled develop product ideas, implement marketing and advertising techniques, and evaluate financial requirements for an innovative food and agribusiness product or service. Students will work as a team to design a marketing campaign and compose the executive summary of a written marketing plan. 

Instructors cover the necessary steps on how to start a food and agribusiness venture. Students write and present a business plan to industry professionals to mimic a real-world experience. The plan incorporates the subject matter learned in previous FABM coursework, so students can apply the knowledge gained in those courses in a practical academic business endeavor.