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apcowboy


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Kroger members have you heard of this???
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I ran across this early this morning on a Kroger board, any you Kroger club members heard of it??

 

Krogers is exporting meat cutting to non-union workers.  They did this with pork years back and now beef is coming in my area.  They take the work, export it to a third party company (in this case, the company exists to serve Krogers, quite literally, it would not exist at all without krogers), this third party company cuts meat for 1/2 the price, ships it to Krogers, then they hire in some low-wage, part time, wage slave at 7.50hr to put it on a shelf, rather than paying people 14-15 to cut and stock it.
Everyone wins but the workers, the union wins cause it collects more dues and Krogers wins cause it get the meat there at a lower cost (of course the quality suffers and the workmanship is gone, but who cares when its a dollar on the line).
 
Just while i'm ranting, anyone else see the cost of the natural cryovac beef? we buy it in at 1.50 and sell it at 6.99-8.99.  Thats insane



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Leon Wildberger

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Jamescutter


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RE: Kroger members have you heard of this???
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I think all chain stores well eventually go to this.


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Pops6927


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RE: Kroger members have you heard of this???
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Oh yes, centralized cutting is the wave of the future, as is non-meat meat (bypassing the animal as the production facility and going from plant to meat directly - they are already doing it in Beyond Meat - beyondmeat.com, sold at Whole Foods).
Walmart has been doing this for 10 years after firing their meatcutting staff; central facility cutting. I saw the early stages on a tour with Mopac in the 80's (now Tyson) at their butchering plant in Pa. 99.95% sanitation controls, producing the first roll ground beef 1, 3, 5, 10 and 20 lb. chubs with a 39 day shelf life.

Don't know if anyone gets "MeatPoultry" emagazine : www.meatpoultry.com. Gives a lot of insight to latest info and developments, equipment, etc.

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Pops6927


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I should add, at the facility we visited (our director of meat operations, Joe Cannestra, took all of us on a field trip) - Mopac - processed steers from the Stairway to Heaven to Vietnamese workers picking nose and ear hairs from the heads, worth over $7,000 / lb for fine artist brushes, plus all other stages of operation from skinning, splitting, rotating through a nitrogen cooler to chill to 38° in 30 minutes, quartering, breaking down to primals and subprimals, trimming, conveyorbelts transporting misc. to trimming lines, COV 'ing of all parts, boxed and on 18 wheelers to transport to distribution facilities, an over-under two stage grinding station as big as a 2 story house, fat analysis to exact mixtures, the chubbing processes, and so on - an all day tour, plus 3 sanitation teardown breaks every 24 hours which every speck of the operation was totally sanitized, all in blues, head caps, gowns, booties, etc. One manager wasn't allowed into the plant as he had a cut on his finger. Very very interesting and educational!

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RIBEYE1877


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Not all krogers do this. it is more for the "value " or lower volume stores. we do get stuff in from meat plant and they have done that for years they call it "case ready meat" but if you are in a high volume store like i am and have a service meat case you still cut your own meat. and grind. around me (the metro atlanta area) most stores that are further.from the city of atlanta cut alot more . i do over 100k a week in fresh meat and there is no way that i could do that a week if i didn't have the case ready product.

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jimhenry2000


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Shortly after I quit my career as a meat manager for Pathmark, they went to centralized cutting.  You'd think they would have learned from past mistakes when they eliminated the full service deli and went to all pre-sliced, pre-packed lunch meats.  It was a total flop and killed their deli business. After about 2 years they went back to full service deli.

The results were about the same when they went to centralized meat cutting.  So they again went back to cutting in the store although they also have quite a bit of pre-cut items also now which helps maintain variety. In addition to killing sales, they found that it not reduce costs that much.  Due to all the excess packaging materials they discovered that you can get a LOT less tonnage on a semi compared to shipping COV sub-primals.



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camorrisiii


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I'm glad that I left Kroger in 2010, I'd heard rumors of Kroger going fully prepacked, it's just a matter of time. Before I left Kroger already had prepacked pork, no fresh pork was cut in the market, that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

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kbraker510


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The Kroger I'm at does not get too much prepack pork, but, grinds we are fully into. If we did the full line of prepack pork we would have 15 to 20+% shrink.....mostly because of short dated product (2-3days as opposed to 5 days store cut) and the volume of the shipped totes.

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Jetplane


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RE: Kroger members have you heard of this???
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I know that Kroger likes to shoot themselves in the foot a lot here lately, but if my store did this, we would lose a lot of customers. We are already getting a lot of customers from Food Lion from their loss of store cut meats. The way Kroger is trying to get the cutters out is by way of frustration from paperwork. Just this week they added a new sheet to fill out to make sure the production planning tool is filled out right...... A form to check another form...... It's just ridiculous. I spend at least 25% of my 8 hour day on key retailing crap. It takes away from the cutting tasks and good customer service.

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kbraker510


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Jetplane.... sounds like the Execution tool to me... If so, just wait, it gets better.

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apcowboy


Founder of The Meat Cutter's Club

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Kroger members have you heard of this???
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Another item on this I ran across

 

In my division, all the fresh meat including beef is prepacked/cut- has been for a couple years. Here's the real deal- All the fresh meat with the exception of chicken is imported from Mexico and Central/South America- then sent to packing house in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, etc. and label for Kroger.
Some of our competition actually advertised on TV and in their ads that their fresh meat is raised and processed in the U.S. sounds like a good selling point to me..
In Texas they're actually forking out some money into fresh beef. We just re-introduced the apprentice and certified meat cutters in our last contract. In 2015 the certified meat cutters will be making $15 / hr.



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kbraker510


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Currently all our beef is born, raised and harvested in the U.S. The COOL mandate upset a lot of customers when they found out they were eating Mexican cows. Thing is they were testing the same beef two weeks prior before the labeling was in force. All test marketing of prepack beef hasn't brought good results. But, that may change.... who here remembers the irradiated beef fiasco?

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jimhenry2000


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apcowboy wrote:

Another item on this I ran across

So sad.  $15/hr can be had by unskilled clerks.  It's just a shame that a meat cutter would have to work for that.

 

In So sadmy division, all the fresh meat including beef is prepacked/cut- has been for a couple years. Here's the real deal- All the fresh meat with the exception of chicken is imported from Mexico and Central/South America- then sent to packing house in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, etc. and label for Kroger.
Some of our competition actually advertised on TV and in their ads that their fresh meat is raised and processed in the U.S. sounds like a good selling point to me..
In Texas they're actually forking out some money into fresh beef. We just re-introduced the apprentice and certified meat cutters in our last contract. In 2015 the certified meat cutters will be making $15 / hr.

 



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camorrisiii


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Jim Henry, some market managers don't even make $15/hr nowadays, it's a shame and an outrage.

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jimhenry2000


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It is indeed, considering you can go to North Dakota and start at $18/hr at McDonalds....



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