World Perspectives

Problem Off the Farm

COVID revealed the raw underbelly of the U.S. food manufacturing industry. While politicians are blaming consolidation and greed for the disrupted supply chain and skyrocketing food inflation, the industry’s problems are far more complex than the sound bites produced in Washington. In sum, food manufacturing is too labor intensive and unproductive relative to overall manufacturing in the U.S. Notably, U.S. food manufacturing was considered the envy of the world in the 1970’s. A major U.S. export at the time was used food processing equipment as manufacturers fought to stay ahead of one another in productivity. Spin forward to today and part of the reason for a labor shortage is not just the pandemic but a failure to automate as...

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FOB Prices and Freight Rates App (Updated 4 March)

WPI Grain Prices and Freight Rate App Note: you can also visit the app directly by clicking here. Supplemental Information The section below offers a concise view of the options available in the current version of the WPI FOB Price and Freight Rate app, along with a short “How To”...

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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.

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