Source: Tom Johnston, MEATINGPLACE, 8/24/11

The U.S. Meat Export Federation has launched a new outreach program to boost U.S. beef exports to regional supermarkets in Mexico, already the largest destination for U.S. beef.

The program targets the northern region of Mexico and several of its regional supermarket chains, including Casa Ley (170 stores), Calimax (72), Santa Fe (60) and Super Del Norte (34). The effort complements USMEF’s typical retail demand-building activities with large, national retailers and distributors in major cities.

“The main goal of this initiative was to reach out to regional supermarket chains that USMEF has not been working with that much,” USMEF Regional Director Chad Russell said. “The idea would be to further penetrate the Mexican retail market and to develop new potential customers for U.S. beef.”

The current focus of the program is educating and training retail meat case operators to modernize their facilities, an effort conducted through the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education.

“The idea would be that through this education and training they might be able to get meat cases and product handling capabilities up to a higher level,” Russell said, adding that in doing so the retailers would become better candidates for aggressive, point-of-sale promotion of U.S. beef.

Through the first half of 2011, U.S. beef and beef variety meat exports to Mexico totaled nearly 280 million pounds valued at $475 million — an increase of 8 percent in volume and 25 percent in value over the same period in 2010.
 

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