The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued their report on the Sioux Falls Smithfield plant inspection. It was pretty much as expected based on our discussion published last Friday. However, there was one tidbit that caught our eye that was otherwise brushed over in the CDC report. The highest rate of infections was in the “pork conversion” department, i.e. fabrication. That makes sense, as unlike the line where employees stand side-by-side (with plexiglass shields now) facing the same direction, in the fab room employees are facing each other. This underscores what we wrote Tuesday, “cuts that take more labor will be the most impacted” may be even slower to respond if there are longer term mitigation chang...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.