USMEF Creating Opportunities for U.S. Red Meat in the Caribbean

Exporting red meat to the Caribbean requires a special set of strategies designed to overcome challenges unique to this market, including lack of storage space for meat, inconsistent cold chain infrastructure and the high cost of electricity.

Liz Wunderlich, U.S. Meat Export Federation representative in the Caribbean, explains that this situation also presents opportunities for U.S. red meat if the U.S. industry can assist hotels, restaurants and distributors to overcome these challenges. One strategy for doing so is to demonstrate how portion-control cuts offer excellent value, consistency and efficiency, giving the U.S. one more advantage over competitors who do not offer portion-control cuts.


TRANSCRIPT:

Ralph Loos: U.S. beef, pork and lamb face a unique challenge in the Caribbean market: many hotels and restaurants have limited space for the storage of red meat products. In this U.S. Meat Export Federation report, Liz Wunderlich explains USMEF’s approach to not only meet that challenge, but put U.S. red meat ahead of the game in a very competitive market.

Liz Wunderlich: Portion-control really is what I consider to be advantage USA, because not only do we have our product that is not easily picked off by our competition in this market – which is Latin America, New Zealand, Australia – they’re not selling portion-control into my market. That said, one of the real challenges is with portion-control you absolutely have to do the math with them. They have to understand the math behind portion-control.

Ralph Loos: Wunderlich says pointing out the advantages of portion control allows her to market U.S. red meat based on something more than just price.

Liz Wunderlich: There’s so much more to portion-control than just the price. They do not in most cases have trained butchers, or do they have a place to send someone to get trained. So they are depending on us to help them, and the easiest way to do it is say hey, let us do it for you, let’s do it at the U.S. cut shop level. Storage space – their chillers and their freezers at the hotel level are very small. They would much rather have space for their customers than space for their product. And the same thing with electricity, it is enormously expensive in the Caribbean. And some of these tour groups actually have a spec that says all your meat must be frozen, because they are so scared of the cold chain management. That makes it an easy sell for portion-control.

Ralph Loos: For more information, please visit USMEF.org. For the U.S. Meat Export Federation, I’m Ralph Loos.