Sometime in August, my Facebook account tells me, I posted this image on my timeline.

Jerry Maguire show me the vaccine meme

I was frustrated, of course, having spent five months at that point navigating around four adults in one house with only an electronic connection to other family and friends. (On the upside, our yard has never looked so good.)

And now, after nine months of quarantine, facing winter and its cold and seemingly unrelenting darkness is daunting. Then — thank you, Pfizer! Thank you, Moderna! — what seemed so far away in August has been delivered to our the temporal doorstep. Pending more tests, of course; nothing is guaranteed.

But hey! There's light at the end of the tunnel and it may not be an oncoming train, after all. And a year from now we may just be living much as we did a year ago. Much, but not exactly.

So what will that look like in the meat industry?

I'm willing to take a few stabs at predicting the future:

The tightly run, high-volume, low-cost supply chain delivering tons of conventionally grown, high quality commodity goods to supermarkets will not regain all of its market share. All those slow-moving consumer trends toward e-commerce grocery shopping, claims-based proteins, alternative proteins and so on have leapfrogged by several years; the industry will have to deliver like it's 2025.
About those claims: Antibiotic use in livestock was overrun in the headlines by the coronavirus, but the issue will come roaring back soon. Whatever marketing plans around antibiotics — their use or absence — that were set aside earlier this year will have to be dusted off, updated and put into circulation, quickly.
U.S. consumers have gained some culinary chops these past months, but convenience will once again rule a year from now, and the demand will favor value-added options. Good news for processors' profit margins, but you have to be prepared to make enough product, at high quality, and get it into consumers' hands, and that may require some redecorating in your processing plant.
But we'll still be smarting from the epic economic recession, so the lower the costs, the better. Super-premium options will find their market growth stymied.
The meat case — or meat delivery service — will have a wider variety of cuts and preparations than would have been possible without a lengthy quarantine period. Consumers have expanded their menus to include cuts of beef, pork and poultry that have never been so popular, like rib-eye filets, tri-tips, ground pork, and chicken and turkey done every which way. And they like it.
Speaking of trying new things, alt-proteins made tremendous strides under quarantine. The market doesn't yet amount to nearly as much as the headlines would have you believe — still less than 1% of the market at retail — but research into plant-based, cultivated and fermented substitutes is moving at warp speed in incubators globally. And consumers see alt-proteins as another part of the protein market, not in opposition to it. The next 12 months is going to make this reality more apparent across the industry: It's "and," not "or."

My crystal ball-gazing is only taking the vaccine and its promise of the end to global shelter-in-place mandates into account. Thousands of other factors are in play here, including the decimation of the independent restaurant industry, the not-yet-understood effect of video conferencing on the travel industry over the long term, the more than 1 million people who have died from COVID-19, and the additional deaths to come next year. They all shift the global economy's trajectory in ways big and small.

But what do you think the meat industry will look like once a vaccine is widely available? What changes are permanent, and which will be a distant memory? Tell me in the comments below — and stay safe.

Show me the vaccine!

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