Branded beef offers producers marketing opportunities

Branded beef offers some marketing opportunities for producers who want to try something else besides selling their cattle into traditional commodity markets. Some of the options are explained below, along with the challenges involved

Laura’s Lean. Nelson Curry is director of cattle procurement for Laura’s Lean in Ontario, Quebec and the north-eastern United States. He says that Laura’s Lean, a branded product developed in the United States, is aiming to slaughter 100 head of cattle
a week at the Kitchener plant of Gencor Foods Inc.

Laura’s Lean is looking for “extremely lean, big-muscled Continental” breed cattle, such as Red Limousin, Charolais, Piedmontese and Blonde d’Aquitaine. Finished cattle should Grade A or AA at most and a hanging carcass should yield at least 65 per cent of the animal’s live weight. Cattle which produce well-marbled steaks grading AAA “have too much carcass fat and intramuscular fat to work in our product,” Curry says.

He notes that Laura’s Lean beef has been sold in Loblaws and A&P stores in Canada for about a year.

Is there a bonus for these cattle? Curry says that producers should look at a payment “grid” on the Gencor website. The premium will differ from one set of cattle to another, Curry says. “We can make it worth their while to work with Laura’s Lean Beef,” he suggests.

Gencor is sourcing calves for Laura’s Lean’s feeding program and can connect cow calf operators with cattle feeders. The Laura’s Lean label is specific about what producers can and can’t use to treat animals. Cattle can’t be fed or injected with antibiotics, can’t be treated with Deccox or ionophores and can’t receive implants “at any time in their lives,” Curry says. Nor can they be fed animal byproducts.

Cattle must be vaccinated with a modified live vaccine and be weaned more than 30 days before shipping to a feedlot. The vaccination program minimizes health problems that would require treatment with antibiotics, Curry says.

Top Meadow Beef. In mid-September, Top Meadow Beef announced that it was the first branded beef program to vaccinate cattle against E.coli157:H7. “We feel there is a group of consumers out there who want to know the story (about how the cattle were raised) and feel good about picking up that steak on the shelf,” says general manager Mike Geddes. “We want to keep them eating meat.”

As for the E. coli 157:H7 vaccine produced by Bioniche Life Sciences Inc. in Belleville, “we wanted to be an early adopter,” Geddes says. The Bioniche vaccine was only recently approved by Health Canada and is available on a limited basis for now.

Located in Clarksburg, Ont., and Flintoft, Sask., Top Meadow Beef began as a seedstock Limousin cattle company, selling purebred bulls and females coast to coast and into the United States, until BSE was discovered in a Canadian cow in 2003 and the border was shut to imports. Top Meadow already saw the value in branded beef and started an “artisan” beef program. Geddes says.

Top Meadow sells bulls to producers to breed their cows. Buyers who raise the calves according to Top Meadow’s specifications have the option of selling them back to Top Meadow for its beef program. Geddes sends new bull owners a manual on how to raise the calves, and buys them back and feeds them on Top Meadow’s own 1,800-head capacity feedlot at Clarksburg in Grey County.

Cattle on the Top Meadow program are slaughtered at Gencor’s plant in Kitchener and also at St. Helen’s Meats in Toronto. An average kill is 40-50 a week. While cattle on the Top Meadow program are fully vaccinated, they don’t receive antibiotics, growth promotants or implants. Sick cattle are treated promptly, double ear-tagged for a positive identification and then sold into the mainstream commercial market, Geddes says.
Geddes points out that calf raisers shipping through the Top Meadow program get a full rundown on how their cattle performed at market. Most cow-calf operators get no information at all about how their calves performed once they are sold. Calf raisers may not even know who bought their calves.

Are producers going to get a premium for shipping cattle to this market? A premium program is in the works. Top Meadow is developing a rewards program for producers who hit targets, but the grid isn’t finished yet, Geddes says.

“We want to reward producers for doing an excellent job,” Geddes says. “It’s a bit of a different twist for the beef industry, rather than trying to get the cattle bought for two or three cents less.”

Certified Ontario Beef Selling branded beef “is very competitive and capital intensive with a small reward,” says Greg Nolan of Bar 5 Stock Farms Ltd. in Markdale. Last summer, he gave up trying to grow the Certified Ontario Beef brand’s share of the meat market, opting instead to focus on cattle genetics sales overseas as the Canadian border opens up. 

Certified Ontario Beef is still available in stores and restaurants in Collingwood, Nolan says.

He thinks the regional branded marketing initiative promoted by the Ontario Cattlemen’s Association offers a good way to get into local markets. “The most viable market penetration tool is to say ‘buy from me. I’m local and I’m a nice guy,’” Nolan says.

The challenge is to get enough money from the branded steaks, which are only about 20 per cent of a beef carcass by weight, to make up for the sixty per cent that is best sold as ground beef and often against a commodity produced by a large packer, and the 20 per cent of the carcass that is unsaleable bone.

“I couldn’t figure out how to do it,” Nolan says. BF

Where to find more information
Certified Ontario Beef
http://www.certifiedontariobeef.com/partners.htm
Top Meadow Farms
http://www.topmeadowfarms.com/beef.htm