In our drive to make our customers successful, our service extends beyond simply offering customers competitively priced meat. Retail Ready account managers visit our customers’ stores to share onsite merchandising strategies, perform cutting demonstrations for meat managers and recommend point of sale material. These are all free value-added services to help differentiate our customers from their competition. If we make our customers successful, we will be successful.
Our active participation in futures markets and our patented forward pricing technology inform our speculative inventory positions. Simply put, Retail Ready is not just another wholesaler: We are a competitive alternative to primary processors. Retail Ready takes out front inventory positions, buying meat that isn’t sold and selling meat that isn’t bought. Our use of sophisticated risk management tools allows us to manage our exposure and offer our customers significant pricing advantages regardless of what is happening on spot markets.
Many of our customers also want to manage their exposure to volatile spot markets, so we have developed a forward contract pricing service. While most other wholesalers use simple buy and freeze programs or “back to back” transactions, Retail Ready has also incorporated a more sophisticated approach that allows us to lock in opportunities offered by futures markets. We use our BeefScout® and BasisGuard® technology platforms to provide flat, forward prices on fresh meat up to 12 months in advance so that our customers have full visibility to costs and do not have to worry about the volatility of the spot market. These forward contract prices are benchmarked against exchange-traded futures markets to ensure transparency and visibility.
Diversifying into commodity risk management was a natural extension of the risk management activities we were doing in-house to support our meat speculation activities. We provide outsourced risk management services to companies wanting to reduce their exposure to volatile commodity markets, but are unable or unwilling to do it in-house.
