The founder of processor Cardinal Meat Specialists has become the first Canadian admitted to the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.
Ralph Cator, who founded Cardinal as a restaurant meat supplier in 1966, was officially inducted Saturday into the hall of fame, alongside 11 others including McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, KFC founder Harland Sanders and Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas (all three named posthumously).
Cardinal is now a national food service supplier of meat and poultry and on average makes about three million burgers a week and 300,000 cooked meat products at its two Mississauga plants.
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Cator, who’s now chairman of Cardinal, became the first Canadian president of the National Association of Meat Purveyors in 1992, and spearheaded its rebranding as the North American Meat Processors. NAMP now operates out of Reston, Va. with a Canadian office in Ottawa.
“Cardinal’s leadership position in North America is due to the hard work of my father, who built the company into a major player in the industry,” Cardinal’s current president Brent Cator said in the company’s release Tuesday.
The Kansas City-based hall of fame expanded eligibility to Canadians for the first time this year, allowing Cator to be nominated and to become the hall’s first Canadian inductee.
The 2010 induction ceremony was held Saturday in Scottsdale, Ariz., as a companion event to the annual NAMP conference.
“This year’s inductees are rightfully credited with fostering much of the profound change, remarkable progress and success of the North American meat industry,” Dan Murphy, founding executive director of the Meat Industry Hall of Fame, said in the same release.
Hall of fame affiliate organizations other than NAMP include U.S. groups such as the National Meat Association, U.S. Poultry and Egg Association, National Turkey Federation, Certified Angus Beef and the American Association of Meat Processors.
Previous inductees to the hall, founded in 2008, have included livestock handling expert Temple Grandin and the late country singer turned sausage baron Jimmy Dean.
