Meat stocks fall, prices rise. Idaho seeks federal probe as butchers, customers pay
When the coronavirus pandemic struck Idaho in mid-March, Cruz Garcia, the co-owner of Idaho Meat & Seafood, wasn’t particularly worried.
The shop in a Meridian strip mall at West Cherry Lane and North Linder Road was able to keep operating as an essential business under Gov. Brad Little’s stay-home order. And it had a drive-thru window, which allowed the butcher shop to lock its doors while continuing to serve customers with minimal contact.
Business remained fairly steady. Idaho Meat & Seafood actually picked up some new customers. It helped that Garcia and his wife, Andrea, expanded the company’s website so customers could place orders online.
Over the past few weeks, though, conditions have become dicier, as the meat processing industry has become one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. Meat shortages are becoming more common as processing plants responsible for 10% of the beef production and 25% of the pork production had closed by late last month.
Prices have risen, too. On Tuesday, Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden and attorneys general from 10 other states sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr asking the Justice Department to investigate suspected price fixing by the nation’s largest beef producers.
“The disparity between the price of live weight cattle and the retail cost of boxed beef sold to consumers is a sign of a market that lacks full and fair competition,” the attorneys general wrote.
President Donald Trump later asked the Justice Department to look into the matter.
Small butcher shops compete with big chains
Four companies, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS and National Beef, control 80% of the industry.
Small operators — such as Idaho Meat and Seafood and a dozen or so other butcher shops in the Treasure Valley — find themselves competing with larger grocery chains for the increasingly limited supply.
“It is making it really difficult for the little guy,” Garcia said in an interview.
When Garcia might purchase a pallet of meat each week, larger chains such as Albertsons, Costco, Fred Meyer or Walmart might ask for 10 truckloads for several stores in a region. He understands that his order doesn’t seem as important to his suppliers.
“They kind of put me on the back burner,” he said.
Garcia is still able to obtain the meat he needs, but he can no longer get it in the quantities that were previously available. So he’s not able to fill his walk-in coolers as easily.
“We’re hanging in there,” Garcia said. “We have several purveyors that we’ve had for years, and we’re still getting product.”
Customer likes ‘fresh, restaurant-quality meats’
Meridian resident Tyler Moorhouse drove up for a package of boneless ribeye steaks. She said she stops by at least once a month. Her father-in-law shops there weekly, she said.
“They’re always really fresh and high quality, restaurant-quality meats,” Moorhouse said. “They’re awesome.”
To make it easier for customers to stock up and make fewer trips to the store, Idaho Meat is offering five different bundles.
One offers 15 pounds of pork ribs, steaks, a roast, Italian sausage and breakfast sausage for $50. Another, for $45, includes eight pounds of pork chops, ground beef, chicken breasts, bacon and shrimp.
For the bundles, Garcia is using prepackaged ground beef from a tube that’s weighed and divided into smaller portions. Normally, the shop grinds its own beef, but Garcia wants to save those cuts for whole pieces, his wife said.
Along with tightening meat supplies, the wholesale price of meat has increased sharply during the past few weeks, co-owner Andrea Garcia said.
A bundle that Andrea Garcia calls “a little bit of everything” includes 4 pounds of sirloin steak, 3 pounds of store-smoked bacon, 3 pounds of pork chops, 10 pounds of ground beef, 4 pounds of ground chuck patties, a 5-pound chuck roast and 10 pounds of chicken breasts. It sold for $149 before the pandemic started. On Thursday, it sold for $219.
“We’ve had to raise our prices as our meat costs have risen,” Andrea Garcia said. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Despite Idaho beginning Stage 1 of Little’s COVID-19 recovery plan last week, allowing most retail stores to open, the Garcias plan to keep their doors closed and rely on online and phone orders for the near future.
“We’re going to play it by ear for a couple of weeks to see what happens and whether the number of coronavirus cases increase,” Andrea Garcia said. “It’s just my husband and I and our son working here, and we can’t afford to get sick. It’s all or nothing for us.”
Pandemic hits meatpacking industry hard
The pandemic has led to the closure of some of the nation’s largest slaughterhouses, including a Smithfield Foods pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where 783 coronavirus cases and two deaths were reported among its 3,700 workers.
COVID-19 cases have been reported at 115 meat and poultry processing plants across the nation, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among 130,000 workers at those plants, 4,913 coronavirus cases have been reported, along with 20 deaths.
Tyson Fresh Meats reopened its Waterloo, Iowa, pork plant on Thursday, after it was closed for two weeks. Before the closure, 444 coronavirus cases were reported among its 2,800 workers.
Another Tyson plant, in Wallula, Washington, between Pasco and Walla Walla, reopened Tuesday after closing 12 days earlier to test workers for the coronavirus. Nearly 12% of the plant’s 1,400 workers tested positive and three have died.
That plant alone processes enough beef each day to feed 4 million people, KOMO-TV of Seattle reported.
Garcia considers butchering cattle himself
If conditions worsen, Cruz Garcia, a former grocery store butcher, is considering buying whole cattle and butchering them himself. For decades, grocery stores and butcher shops did just that before processing plants in the 1970s began vacuum sealing smaller cuts of meat that they sent to stores in boxes.
The refrigerated display case inside Idaho Meat & Seafood was empty Thursday. With the doors locked to customers, there was no need to stock rows of prime-grade New York steaks, pork chops, chicken breasts, carne asada and ground beef. The homemade Mexican chorizo and Italian sausage, along with halibut fillets and crab legs, were out of sight in coolers.
Customers must go online to order or call the shop at 208-895-2201. Orders are ready for pickup the next day.
Meat supplies plummet for Caldwell butcher
Rick Martinez, owner of Rick’s Caldwell Meats, said he’s able to obtain only about 40% of the meat he needs. He said if he asks his suppliers for 10 cases of meat, he’ll get two or three.
“I’m scrambling every day,” Martinez said Friday by phone. “I used to get shipments twice a week. Now it’s one time a week. I’ve even picked up meat at a grocery store just so I’d have enough.”
For a while, he imposed limits on how much beef, pork or chicken customers could buy at a time but later abandoned that.
“I went to the resolution like if I have the product to sell and I want to make a little bit of money, I’m just going to sell it to the first person that comes in,” Martinez said.
Like Meridian Meat & Seafood, Caldwell Meats offers bundles, ranging from 21 pounds to 214 pounds. Early in the pandemic, the number of bundles the store sold rose dramatically as people stocked up and froze it, he said.
As his supplies dried up, he found it more difficult to fill those orders, he said.
“Right now, I have about 30 of them to do, and I don’t have any meat to fill them with,” he said. “I’m no longer taking orders for them, because I don’t like telling people they might have to wait three or four weeks to get those orders filled.”
Martinez, who has owned the shop at 2609 Blaine St. for three years, said costs have risen as much as 150%, giving customers sticker shock.
“I want people to understand that we’re not price gouging anybody,” he said.
This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
