The effort in Europe to label food for multiple societal purposes will eventually find its way to U.S. so policymakers in Washington should pay attention. There is the traditional battle over how best to convey nutrition information to inform consumers over how to eat better than they do. There is confusion over how best to do this. Back in 1992, U.S. policymakers settled on the curious approach of expressing a product's calories and nutrients at a level consumed by a middle-aged woman lest it over-recommend for that cohort. The idea of simply expressing calorie content and letting each individual figure out their overall caloric needs was rejected. There have been similar straight-forward metrics used in Europe, but others think a s...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.