A better red meat future

IT is titled Towards a Better Red Meat Future, a Green Paper for the Red Meat MoU.

Commissioned by RMAC (Red Meat Advisory Council) who happens to be the formal custodian of the MoU, an 11 member task force headed up by distinguished former Queensland public servant Jim Varghese has consulted widely with stakeholders over the last five months to put forward for further discussion four possible restructure options.

But before coming to those options, what is the purpose of the current MoU, why is it in need of reform and what is it about this particular process that suggests the possibility of achieving consensual reform?

Firstly the MoU is the document that governs the red meat industry’s institutional arrangements and establishes the roles and responsibilities of the respective players such as MLA, AMPC, LiveCorp and the peak industry representative bodies.

However 20 years have elapsed since the MoU came into being during which time the industry has grown in size and complexity.

In the consultation process, stakeholders have presented a picture of intense competition, disruption, innovation and rapid change which characterises the commercial realities for the 82,000 businesses that participate in the red-meat industry.

A majority of those stakeholders appear to view the MoU as a document high on principles and good intentions but aside from specific funding commitments, has limited teeth or legal obligations that force participants to engage and collaborate more effectively on cross-industry matters.

Across industry there is a broad appetite for change either through strengthening the existing arrangements or identifying new governance arrangements.

In his chairman’s foreword, Mr Varghese pointed to the consultation process as the reason this review might succeed where others have not.

He said, “I am encouraged that our consultations with industry bodies and the broader business community have detected a growing recognition and appetite to reinvent how the Red Meat MoU, and by extension the red meat industry, operates.

“In short, there appears to be proactive energy to grasp the opportunity to change the current strategy to what is wanted and needed.”

That consultation has translated into four options:

SOFT drinks and snacks are the sorts of items normally associated with vending machines but how about fresh meat? While the notion of feeding some coins into a machine and having a pound of sausages drop into the delivery slot might seem a bit far-fetched, it is in fact a reality and proving very successful for a butchering business in a small town in upstate New York. According to Bloomberg who first ran the story late last year, Joshua Applestone founded the Applestone Meat Co as a small processing facility that did not initially include a retail component.

However local demand for the quality of product he dealt in was such that he felt he had to come up with a way of meeting that demand without the cost of a fully-blown retail shop. The answer was a refrigerated carousel sandwich machine with added credit-card capacity.

Instead of sandwiches the machine was filled with packaged meat which the customer could view and select by using buttons to rotate the carousel. In no time the four machines he installed at the front of his premises were turning over around 1400kg of product per week. Now it seems Applestone is on the expansion trail with multiple machines planned for other small-village locations and ultimately Manhattan. For this he has developed custom-made machines which will carry a much larger selection.

Vacuum packaged muscle cuts are allowed seven days in the refrigerated case with a shorter period for ground beef products. While the concept seems to work well enough in the relatively benign small-village environment, there is a concern that machines carrying product of much higher value than a can of soft drink in a place like Manhattan may need added security.  

CONTINUING hot and dry conditions in the southern half of Queensland are keeping both slaughter and feeder cattle flowing.With a relatively comfortable pipeline of two weeks, one major processor dropped 5 cents on Monday bringing published and non-published grids to 520-525c/kg for 4-tooth ox and 440-450 for heavy cow. Feeders however are three weeks out in some major feedlots and rates have dropped around 15 cents in the last three weeks.

In the southern states cows continue to hit the saleyards in big numbers with more than 1000 at Wagga on Monday.

MLA reported 72,593 in last week’s Queensland kill and that was despite Mackay being out for annual maintenance and Townsville down due to the floods.