One of the oldest agricultural concerns in the US has announced an aggressive new business strategy aimed at boosting profits. Kansas City-based Farmland Industries is to focus less on its core slaughterhouse operations and fresh meat sales and more on high-margin sales of branded case ready and pre-cooked pork and beef sales.
Adding value has proved as efficient a method of jumpstarting profits as product innovation back at the baseline, and Farmland CEO Bob Honse has decided brand marketing is the way forward.
“There is not a lot of money in just slaughtering animals,” said Honse in an interview. “We used to have the focus that we wanted to kill more animals. Now we’re more interested in processing the animals and in value-added marketing. That’s made a huge change in the mentality around here.”
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