Fast Food, Consumer Credit, and Protein Demand Some very bullish economic news from the first quarter of 2012 caught our eye today. First, fast food restaurant chain Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut) announced that its 1Q 2012 net income had increased over 1Q 2011 by a huge 73 percent. Yum! was paced by a 6 percent increase in same store sales for Taco Bell, 5 percent for Pizza Hut, and 2 percent for KFC. Taco Bell is introducing a breakfast menu in the U.S. Operating profits for the chain are up 27 percent in the U.S. and 9 percent globally. Yum! opened more than 650 stores in China last year. Of course, Yum! had been using lean, finely textured beef (LFTB) and has announced it would no longer do so. Its sa...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.