Washington - Despite renewed worries about E. coli and other hazardous bacteria, America's beef industry has stabilized after a difficult 1996 and is trying for a further breakthrough by tailoring more products for of people too busy to plan meals.
Industry market research shows an estimated 40 percent of consumers don't know by 4 p.m. what they'll have for dinner -- not exactly time enough to choose pot roast or beef stew for the evening's menu.
"Americans want food that looks and tastes like a lot of effort, but in reality was prepared with no muss, no fuss," said Chuck Schroeder, chairman of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
To meet that requirement, Schroeder said several beef companies are now selling fully cooked, ready-to- eat pot roasts that can be prepared in a microwave in seven minutes. The cattlemen's group is offering $250,000 to the company that invents the best such product this year.
This initiative is coupled with an effort to help retailers improve marketing of fresh beef, one of the few food products still sold on a generic basis with no brand name. All segments of the industry, from ranchers to packers, are attempting to work closer together to meet consumer demand.
"The goal is for the industry to act more like a company selling a branded product," said Clark Willingham, a Melissa, Texas, cattleman and incoming president of the association.
The future of the U.S. beef industry is critical to the nation's economy. Beef is the biggest segment of American agriculture, with about 1 million ranchers and dairy producers and some $50 billion in annual sales. The U.S. cattle industry owns more than 101 million head.
The industry's new direction follows a wave of scare stories about E. coli bacteria and ground beef, topped by the recall last August of 25 million pounds of hamburger by Hudson Foods Co. in Arkansas. Fear of "mad cow disease" in European beef took its toll, although the disease has not been detected in the United States.
Food safety caught the public's attention as many ranchers were rebounding from disastrously low cattle prices in 1996 caused mainly by bad weather and high feed prices. But Agriculture Department projections show the scares haven't frightened people away from beef.
On a boneless weight basis, Americans will eat about 63 pounds of beef per person in 1998, compared with 51 pounds of chicken and 46.7 pounds of pork. The beef-consumption numbers are less than 1 percent lower than 1997's.
Americans still love their hamburgers and cheeseburgers: more than 5.4 billion were sold at restaurants in 1996, a 3.8 percent increase from the year before.
But improving safety will be a hot topic this year, as the Agriculture Department implements new anti- bacteria rules in large processing plants and efforts proceed on several government and private fronts to detect and combat E. coli and other microbes from farm to dinner table.
Schroeder, chairman of a new beef safety council, said the industry has "an unprecedented sense of unity and urgency" to ensure beef is safe, including industry sharing of improved production techniques and more privately funded research.
The cattlemen's association also points out that of 17,000 ground beef samples tested randomly for E. coli over three years by the Agriculture Department, only 10 came up positive. More E. coli illnesses have been traced to items such as unpasteurized cider and produce.
President Clinton has outlined plans to put another $71 million for food safety into his fiscal 1999 budget proposal. Several food-safety bills are pending in Congress, including one to toughen the Agriculture Department's recall and penalty authority.
For shoppers, retail beef prices are expected to remain steady in 1998 even though the money being paid to ranchers for cattle is going up. The reasons are a cyclical reduction in cattle production coupled with reduced exports and an increase in competition from chicken and pork.
A factor in the low U.S. consumer prices is Asia's economic crisis, where 75 percent of U.S. beef exports were sold in 1996. Devaluation of Asian currency could force those countries to buy cheaper beef from Australia, New Zealand and Canada. U.S. beef exports were down 2.3 percent in October compared with October 1996.
For the rancher, cattle prices are projected at between $71 and $76 per hundred pounds in 1998, up from $66 last year.
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