WE’LL NEVER BE THE BIGGEST — THAT’LL NEVER BE A STATEMENT YOU’LL HEAR OUT OF OUR GROUP — BUT WE WANT TO BE THE BEST. AND WE FOCUS AND WE WAKE UP EVERY DAY TO BRING EXCELLENCE TO THE TABLE.
The connected system focuses on raising the best animals in the industry with the best genetics and feed programs to produce a higher quality product. And then from there, we’ve matured over that 27-year history into an enterprise with three processing plants, three bacon divisions, and then a hamboning operation down in Reynosa, Mexico. So I look at our organization, and we’ll never be the biggest — that’ll never be a statement you’ll hear out of our group — but we want to be the best, and we focus and we wake up every day to bring excellence to the table. When you look at that, we’ve got a 20-year runway ahead of us. So Seaboard has owned Daily’s Meats since 2007. Daily’s is a business, a bacon business, that really started in food service, and has a 130-year-old history processing meats and bacon into food service, but we only launched into retail three years ago. So if I were to look at the future of Seaboard Foods, that 20- year run that hopefully I will be able to lead, we’ll be focused on growing and expanding our value-added business. So, growing the Daily’s Meats line both into retail for bacon. We only launched retail bacon three years ago. Since that time, we’ve actually been the fastest-growing bacon brand but now we’ll look to parlay that into other categories, and so some of the categories, we’ve built a five-year plan. As far as the categories we plan to enter, we’re looking at and expanding into chub sausage. We dropped in capabilities within our Guymon, Oklahoma, facility to be able to better serve our food service and retail customers and move to more retail focused packaging. So think one-pound chubs, but then also grow and expand in the cooked and raw breakfast and dinner sausage categories. That’s an area we’ve really never played in.
But when you look at our share of the harvest within the country, our expectation is to get there both on the value-added side in addition to the live animal side. So continuing to grow in value added in the lines of chubs, cooked breakfast and dinner sausage, charcuterie, and then other cooked and prepared pork categories — that’s really the focus for our company and our brands moving forward. With your five-year plan, let’s look back at the last five years of challenges that may have helped define that plan, or anything that you’ve learned. Absolutely, the industry is coming off the worst 18 months in the history of pork production. We’re coming off COVID, where you had really strong protein demand, and you’re seeing that sink. At the same time we had extremely high grain and input costs, as well as labor costs coming into our business, which made, you know, really this past year, one of the worst years on record for our industry. Now, if you were to look at that, and you look at our Daily’s bacon business for 2023, they actually had the best year in their 130-year history. So if you look at the value-added business, it acts as a natural hedge to the raw and fresh pork side. And so it’s given us an incentive to move into that space and create a natural hedge for each other. So as the fresh pork side suffers, you have the value- added side that can pick up the other side of the business really. I would say that while we created that plan prior to this past year, this past year has really been the start of executing that plan, it’s only further driven the need for Seaboard to be more into the value-added categories.
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