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East of Broken Bow | I'd disagree with that. Some years ago, I joined into a Co-Op that was intended to process the member's hogs, and sell the meat. What we learned was that the odd things were actually the EASIEST things to get sold. For example, in Singapore, chewing gum is not allowed, so they chew flavored (usually smoked) pork 'bungs'. Yes, that's right, they literally bought flavored pig but*****les to use in the place of chewing gum. Ditto a bunch of other things. There were specialty meat places, wanting to buy the skinned heads, to be made into head cheese and the organs for other ethnic meats. It seems the 'big' packers didn't want to slow the line enough to process limited amounts of these things, so a smaller plant, with custom cutting abilities, was able to tap into these markets, and add profit to each hog processed. Most of these orders were too small for a big plant to bother messing with.
Where the Co-Op got put out of business, was in the general Pork market. The big packers more or less told the mom & pop stores with little buying power, if they didn't get all their meat from them, they wouldn't bring them any. The big chains, were only concerned about cost, and unless you could deliver truckloads at a time, at a lower price than the big packers, you were out. That left local restaurants, and a few small chain grocers to carry the pork.
Then, to top it off, after the big boys found out there was a new processing plant up and running, bid up the prices on hogs in the area, cutting the supply of hogs available at a profitable price way down, and that was the final nail in the coffin. When the Co-Op either couldn't deliver the full promised shipments, or had to bid up hogs so high they lost money on them, it was only a matter of time.
Yes, there were obvious violations of the law by the big packers, but no one seemed to care, or at least no one who could have done anything about it. By the time any investigation was started, the Co-Op was broke. | |
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packing plant
