000326 UFCW Weighing Options to Challenge Wal-Mart Move

Wal-Mart and its main meat supplier, IBP Inc., based in Dakota Dunes, SD, both say they have been working to switch all the chain's beef to prepackaged since March 1999. At that time, Wal-Mart began experimenting with prepackaged steaks and other beef in some of its Arkansas stores. Sales jumped, store officials said.

Officials at Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart said “case-ready meat” - slaughtered, cut and vacuum-packed at the packing plant instead of the store - is part of a long evolution in the way meat is prepared for American dining tables.

Stores once received whole or half carcasses of beef and did all the butchering. Beginning about 30 years ago, packing plants reduced the carcasses to boxes full of meat parts, which were then cut or ground and wrapped by store meat cutters. That step reduced the amount of labor needed at the store while still allowing for custom orders.

Elsewhere, an even bigger change was taking place in the handling of poultry. The birds were slaughtered, cut into pieces and packaged at the poultry plant and shipped to stores, which simply put the finished product on display.

Beef was not routinely handled the same way because prepackaged beef tended to look deep purple or brown in color, not the red that consumers expect, said Pat Pines, a vice president at the American Meat Institute. Recent advances in packaging material now allow the factory-packaged meat to arrive on grocers' shelves looking just like freshly cut meat - and at less overall cost to the stores, she said.

Prepackaged meat solves another pressing problem for grocery stores - a shortage of butchers, according to Flickinger, the food-industry consultant in Westport, Conn.

“Wal-Mart and other stores have been studying for years buying pre-cut, packaged meat because it's tough to find enough meat cutters, especially in the evenings and weekends,” he said.

Greg Denier, a spokesman for the 1.4 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers, which is trying to organize the Wal-Mart meat cutters, said talk of the demise of butchers is premature.

“You'll see more case-ready (meat) in the future,” Denier said. “But you'll still see meat departments and meat cutters because consumers like to get special cuts of meat, consumers like to ask for a fresh grind.”

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