MEAT TECH CENTER OPENING POSTPONED

PAMELA BLAMEY

CHICAGO -- The opening of the National Livestock and Meat Board's Meat Marketing Technology Center, scheduled for this month, has been postponed until January 1996.

Sources close to the project said some retailers need more time to acclimate meat department employees to the new methods the center requires.

Officially, the Meat Board said that continuing refinements to the center's program are contributing to the delay.

"There are two things happening simultaneously that are contributing to a slight delay in the opening of the center," C.J. Valenciano, a spokeswoman for the Meat Board here, told SN.

"We are changing and refining the program. When we were talking to retailers we realized there was a need for more information. We've also been discovering new things which will make it really dynamic and useful when it opens in January."

According to NLMB, the center is intended to be a meat marketing technology resource for retailers, offering education, management and technical training, consultation and case study research. Its goal is to establish wide usage of improved information and management systems, and to increase meat department sales and profit through the principles of value-based meat management.

Seven retailers have so far contributed feedback to the project, Valenciano said. The collection of feedback is continuing.

"We're looking at very different retailers to make sure [the center] works for all formats," Valenciano explained. "We added three new retailers into the mix this summer, [and] we expect to have results later this fall."

A low level of commitment from retailers has contributed most to the delay, according to sources close to the project.

"Everybody has to buy into this idea," said John Story, director of meat and deli at Northfield, Minn.-based Fairway Foods. Story is working closely with the project coordinators.

"In other words, if you're going to go into a company and you're going to get that company involved in this tech center, and [have] people trained through it and so on, you have to get a commitment all the way from the top through to the bottom in the company itself.

"And while we said those things in the past, I'm not sure that we necessarily believed them. [But] it's pretty evident that that has to happen because you're talking about not only money here, but you're talking about expenditure of time, so there have to be commitments made for that, [the retailers have to] budget for it," Story said.

Another meat executive, whose company has applied the basic technologies offered by the center, offered this assessment: "It's a complex process, there's a lot of technology required, and a lot of the users in other areas of the country do not have the technical know-how or the time and resources to get this thing going."

Getting meat executives and other meat department employees to change their practices has proved difficult, agreed Story.

"You have to get the commitment from the company that they really want to do this -- in other words, that they're willing to change their ideas and their thinking about how you operate a meat department at retail, both from the standpoint of the productivity of it and also maybe the pricing of it and the margins," Story said. "[The center is] not trying to dictate what those are going to be, but the case may be that there's a different way of approaching it," he continued.

Linking the meat department to other parts of the store is also not an easy task, Story said. "You have to go out and do some real work at the retail level, particularly trying to tie in the front end to the system with the meat department so that you're getting accurate information. "What we found in two or three of the companies that we've worked with so far is that cleaning up the data takes an awful long time. There's very little cooperation, coordination or communication between the scanning coordinator in the store and the meat director. They don't talk the same language, so you've got to clean up the language and get them on the same course.

"That takes quite a lot of time," Story said.

One aid to the process will be new Uniform Meat Identity Standards, due out Nov. 1, Story added.

"They've been working on a revision of that for the last 20 years," he said. "It's an excellent piece, a good training piece, a good management tool, and it also identifies those products correctly in whatever region of the country you're in, and it ties them to a Universal Product Code number.

"So that's the next thing you have to have, you have to have those [items tagged] by UPC number, so that you can start to collect that data.

"This is a major, major undertaking, no one realizes the significance of this, the adjustment, from the outside," Story said.

The project itself is not in any danger, however. "This will probably not be a revolutionary thing as far as the industry, but it will certainly be evolutionary, simply because it will happen, whether people want it to happen or not," Story said.

Another reason for the delay was the board's recent decision to become exclusively a beef organization and to consolidate with another beef association. (See related story on this page.) Valenciano was confident that the change will not jeopardize the center. "The center was a Meat Board program, and will continue to be a meat case program," she said. "The only uncertainty is to what level other species will get in and be supported. But the technical center will continue to focus on improving profitability for the meat department."

Story said he believes that the merger will not affect the support of nonbeef species at the center. "It will pretty much be on an equal basis. I don't see a lot of change with that."