CAB® 3QQ
Three quick questions with David MacVane.
Grocery stores aren't foreign or exotic, but everyday, ordinary places. Everybody has been to one; they serve the fundamental purpose of providing a place to buy food. There are the basic departments: meat, produce, bakery, etc. But no matter how similar the stores might seem at the base level, they are certainly not the same.
David MacVane
Certified Angus Beef LLC (CAB) draws on the expertise of David MacVane of Middletown, N.Y., to help find those differences and capitalize on that understanding. He gets the company into stores, learns who the influencers are, and then talks the talk — easy enough because he is one of them.
MacVane started out with a meat apprenticeship, where he worked through the ranks of journeyman and then meat buyer and meat director. He managed grocery stores and worked for IBP as a field consultant before joining the CAB team in 2004. All of this experience recently led MacVane to his role of CAB assistant vice president for business development, bringing even more focus to the retail sector.
To get a better feel for the brand's retail strategy, I asked David three quick questions:
First give us a state of the industry. What is the No. 1 challenge for retail meat departments, and what's the opportunity for CAB?
In these tough economic times, retailers are seeing their sales shift into more value purchases. We're seeing a lift in poultry products. We're seeing a lift in family-size packaging for a greater value. Some of the challenges are quality issues vs. price issues. We're trying to educate the retailer that the consumer still wants a value, but value actually means quality and using the Certified Angus Beef® (CAB®) brand.
They might have to shift to different cuts and really look at merchandizing different parts of the carcass that still offer great eating experiences. Some of the packers have come out with new packaging to extend shelf life on flank steak, tri-tips, flat irons, the boneless short ribs and different items like that so we don't have large shrink loss. We don't have the meat that expires before it's sold, creating waste and costing them money.
Aside from having personal conversations with the meat buyers, store managers and executive boards, what does your team do to convince a retailer that your strategies will work?
We come in and look at cost analysis and complete data analysis where we take ad projections and work on actual gross profit on different items. We offer training seminars and demonstrations of new products. We'll test cuts for palatability and performance.
We have a full briefcase of information to help our stores and retailers. It's a full-blown education, information and data management process that we're trying to achieve to help drive sales for the whole industry.
What is CAB's plan for growth in retail?
We continue to train and educate, and where we feel we need a stronger presence in a market, we will definitely add a retailer. We like to do a better job penetrating our current markets with our existing retailers, becoming greater partners, to help them grow sales and be more profitable. But we do have markets throughout the country, for sure, where we're trying to improve our presence.
David and his wife, Kim, live in central New York with their two sons.
