Farm Beat: Foster Farms hopes to score with bowl game

Foster Farms has raised many turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas tables. Now it’s part of another holiday tradition: college football bowl games.

As we reported Thursday, the first Foster Farms Bowl will take place Dec. 30 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, the new home of the San Francisco 49ers. It will involve teams from the Pac-12 and Big Ten conferences – not the top teams, which will go to bigger bowls, but well-known colleges nonetheless.

The cost of the bowl sponsorship was not available, but it no doubt is a major endeavor by the company. ESPN will carry the action in prime time nationwide, spreading the Foster Farms brand well beyond its stronghold in the West.

Max and Verda Foster started the business in 1939 on a ranch west of Waterford. It is now based in Livingston, where it has its largest chicken plant, and processes turkeys at two plants in Turlock. About 4,800 people work at those operations, and about 7,000 more at sites elsewhere in California and in other Western and Southern states.

The bowl game will take place on the second-to-last day of 2014, a year when Foster Farms both celebrated its 75th anniversary and dealt with a salmonella outbreak tied to raw chicken from Livingston and two Fresno plants. That struggle did not deter the organizers of the game, which has been held under other names since 2002.

“We couldn’t be more pleased to welcome Foster Farms as the game’s title sponsor,” said Al Guido, chief operating officer for the 49ers, in a news release. The professional team is part of the partnership that is putting on the college game.

Past games have been played at AT&T Park in San Francisco, home to the Giants baseball team. The first two were called the Diamond Walnut San Francisco Bowl, sponsored by a Stockton-based company that is a big player in the Central Valley nut industry. The next six were the Emerald Bowl, named for Diamond’s snack nut line.

It was the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl from 2010 to 2012 and the Fight Hunger Bowl last year, all of them raising money to help Bay Area people who are short of food. Foster Farms, which already was active in this cause, will continue it with its bowl game.

“Every ticket sold to the game is a ‘meal ticket’ for a hungry family in the Bay Area,” said Gary Cavalli, the game’s co-founder and executive director, in the release.

By the way, the two teams will be playing on grass grown by West Coast Turf near Stevinson, not far from Foster Farms’ headquarters in Livingston. And they will do so just two days after the last regular-season home game for the 49ers, led by Turlock-raised quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Foster Farms also will fight hunger this Monday in Manteca, continuing another holiday tradition. The company will deliver 750 turkeys to Second Harvest Food Bank, which serves Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties. They are among more than 4,500 that will go to food banks in California, Oregon and Washington, enough to feed about 84,000 people.

This story was originally published November 14, 2014 at 5:41 PM with the headline "Farm Beat: Foster Farms hopes to score with bowl game."