COLLEGE STATION — When they dealt out CARDS in 1991, a Texas A&M University System research and education team had no idea their action would create such big winners.
CARDS, or Computer-Assisted Retail Decision Support, is software that is helping break a $4 billion logjam in the beef industry by encouraging retailers to buy more closely trimmed meat.
Versions of the software are also available for the pork industry and will be released to lamb industry in mid-1994. But CARDS’ impact has been most felt in the beef industry, according to Dr. John Walter of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.
The program has shown retailers they can make healthy profits by purchasing and reselling the more closely trimmed beef that consumers have come to demand.
As a result, some packers who once sold no such beef now ship up to 25 percent of their company’s products to retailers in that form. Moreover, some companies predict they’ll sell nothing but such products as early as 1995, Walter said.
“I never thought this would have the success it has,” Walter said. “It has really been a part of making beef more healthful and affordable as well as a more profitable industry.”
As consumer demand for more closely trimmed and leaner meats has grown, consumers also are buying less meat that they have to trim themselves. Retailers and packers found themselves in a quandary over who would bear the costs of trimming and disposing of the fat, a process that cost the beef industry alone some $4 billion annually.
Don Fender, director of field sales services for Excel Corp. of Wichita, Kansas, said Excel pioneered closely trimmed beef products in the mid-1980s. “We found difficulty marketing it with any volume simply because we couldn’t convince retailers of its value,” he said.
The onus of trimming was taken on by retailers, who did not believe they could profitably sell meats trimmed at packing plants. They therefore did not buy them — which kept packers from developing those product lines.
CARDS has helped change all that. It has shown retailers how labor costs, quality and yield grades, fat-trim levels, price paid to packers and other factors impact bottom-line retail profit margins. Retailers can use the software to make decisions on which kinds of meat they might purchase from packers, whether it is the more closely trimmed, boxed meat or larger cuts that retailers must trim themselves.
Retailers have seen that they could indeed afford to purchase the closely-trimmed beef or pork from packers, who charge a premium to trim what used to be cut off by consumers.
“It has really taken off and has become a very significant percentage of our total sales volume. It’s also increasing rapidly and encouraging advances in our product mix,” said Fender, whose company sells both beef and pork that are closely trimmed.
As a result, Excel is a big fan of CARDS. Fender said the company has equipped all 25 of its meat consultants with laptop computers that use the software.
First shipped to the beef industry in late 1991, CARDS has since been updated and improved and is available free to the meat industry.
“We’ve essentially given both sides a calculator and said, ‘Here, you figure out what it’s worth,’ ” Walter said. “CARDS gave them a means of assessing the value of a product.”
CARDS was developed by Walter and Drs. Jeffrey Savell and Davey Griffin, all members of Texas A&M’s animal science department, and Kenneth Johnson and Dr. Terry Dockerty of the National Live Stock and Meat Board in Chicago. The research has been funded by the board through fees paid by livestock producers.
“I think we were perceived by all parties as being neutral, pro-beef and reputable, and that helped get the project funded and into the market,” Walter said.
CARDS initially was developed in spreadsheet form after lengthy testing at Texas A&M. The testing included a simulated retail meat-cutting area in which factors affecting profitability, especially time needed to trim meat, were carefully recorded and analyzed.
CARDS users can enter various values for yield grade, quality grade and trim level. The program calculates labor, packaging and case-stocking costs based on data gathered by Texas A&M, but users also can modify the program based on their own information.
The program’s success brought honor to the team in mid-January as the Texas A&M agriculture program named it a winner of the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence.
Walter said the beef industry expects market pressure for lean cattle to shift to feedyards and ranchers. Eventually, cattle bred and fed to have low levels of trimmable fat could be at a premium in the marketplace, he said.
“The beef industry should really make strides in breeding,” Walter said. “Packers will look for lean cattle instead of buying the over-fat cattle as they have in the past.” The CARDS team’s efforts to help the industry with its so-called “War on Fat” may have at least one minor drawback, however.
“We may just succeed ourselves out of a job,” Walter said. “But there are other projects to work on.”
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