The U.S. red meat sector works to ship as much chilled product as possible. Rusty Halvorson has a story explaining why.
The U.S. red meat sector leans heavily on “reliability” and “supply ability” to maintain a market edge around the world.
Here’s U.S. Meat Export Federation (USMEF) President and CEO Dan Halstrom.
“One of our strategic goals is to ship as much chilled that we can, never frozen, because then you create a value added proponent to it. And the other advantage of shipping chilled versus frozen is that you’re shipping 52 weeks of the year, so you take out that price component. They’re buying whether the market’s going up or going down, versus frozen, where, hey, I’ll wait until the market goes lower and you miss the ups and the downs. So shipping it chilled, is a strategic advantage that we have, not only into Asia, North Asia, Southeast Asia, you know, Mexico, 90 some percent of the exports on our side are chilled going into Mexico, so in Central America even. So, you know, aside from our high quality grain finished beef and pork, I would say that the supply ability of chilled is key.”
According to USMEF, exports of U.S. beef totaled 103,980 mt in September, up 5% year-over-year, while export value climbed 6% to $843.8 million.
September pork exports totaled 238,047 metric tons (mt), up 8% from a year ago, while value increased 6% to $685.1 million.