I love collecting meat industry ephemera. One of my most recent finds occurred on eBay for a collection of extant materials related to a meat industry publication, Meat Merchandising. Owned by St. Louis, Missouri-based Merchandising Publication Corporation and published by Von Hoffman Press, Meat Merchandising began in 1925 and ceased publication sometime in the mid-1950s. The primary mission of the magazine, according to the publisher’s affidavit, was to improve “better merchandising in the retail meat branch of the food industry” and to share “fact stories telling what successful meat merchants are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are doing it.” During the publication’s heyday in the mid-1930s, subscribers totaled nearly 56,400 independent meat retailers and 18,240 retail chain meat markets across the United States per month. Considering that there were 110,000 independent retail stores in 1932, it is impressive that Meat Merchandising managed to reach half of the nation’s market share.

Although this trove of documents holds intrinsic, historical appeal, their real value is the lesson they can still impart to the modern meathead. Surprisingly, the same, basic problems that bedeviled every grocer, meat market, packer, processor, and butcher shop as revealed by Meat Merchandising nearly 100 years ago are nearly the same as those issues facing meatheads today.

In some article page proofs for an advertising client, Meat Merchandising lamented that “the machine age has invaded nearly every field, but it has yet to find a way to eliminate the need for an expert meat cutter in the retail meat store.” While machines have certainly replaced work performed in the meat industry since 1932, the statement posed by Meat Merchandising is still salient today. As our industry continues to face labor shortages, the need for semi-automation and or full automated robotic cutting is more important than ever. Challenges remain in this sector, namely producing the same results as hand-cut products and human decision-making processes on the line. But it is hard to envision robots at the meat counter. How would a machine or AI replace the most trusted individual, other than the pharmacist, at the meat counter?

Meat Merchandising also provided subscribers with innovative ways to provide value to misunderstood meat items. For example, in Store Tested Ideas for Meat Men, one of several books Meat Merchandising published, author Albert Todoroff suggested that retailers increase their gross profit by breaking down a bone-in ham three ways, creatively preparing beef and lamb hearts, stuffing veal breasts, offering cooked meats at the counter, selling old boning knives to customers, and offering bone scraps to customers. Some of these suggestions might seem like common sense today, but at the time, they were novel. Carcass utilization and product movement are still issues facing every grocer, butcher, or processor today, so increasing rate of movement while adding value certainly is relevant for today’s operator.

One of the most striking features contained in Meat Merchandising are the countless cooking suggestions for various meat cuts. As Todoroff continually emphasized, “suggest the right cooking” to your customer. Today, various retailers today offer recipes in weekly advertisements, QR codes on packages, direct email campaigns, social media, or rewards apps, but it seems that cooking advice at the retail counter has all but disappeared as more and more meat marketing managers have relied on technology to perform these tasks. Instead, you are seeing more prepared and pre-seasoned meat at the meat counter and the self-service case, which is up 60% from 2020 according to NAMI’s 2023 Power of Meat Report. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent labor woes fueled this change in the industry, but some of my most successful retail customers, like Smokehouse Market in Chesterfield, Mo., provide cooking advice at the meat counter. They also hand out pre-printed pamphlets and cooking instructions along with any purchase, but most importantly, they talk to their customers. Conversing with customers, especially on slow days, as suggested by Meat Merchandising in 1945, will allow you to “do a better job of getting acquainted with your customers and thus make it possible for you to insure future business from that customer.” In this way, the personal touch can sometimes be better than the virtual, and it certainly will be more memorable to the customer than the phone swipe.

While some of the advice proffered by Meat Merchandising isn’t relevant today, I found myself reflecting on my own experiences, conversations, and challenges as I dug through my recently acquired collection. I was also faced with several questions: To whom do we market? With our ever-present focus on microbiology and meat science, are we too technical for today’s consumer, and how do we relate basic information such variation in meat color to the end user? With more and more self-service cases on the rise, how do we break implicit assumptions about meat when we can’t interact with the end-user? Since animals haven’t changed in millennia, how can we provide additional value to the end user? How can well-respected media outlets such as Meatingplace help in this regard outside of the industry? How can we return to some proven past practices? But are we too susceptible in our hyper-connected world to discard all previous knowledge as false, misleading, or without merit? Or is this simply a condition of human nature observed by author George Orwell so many years ago: “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

Perhaps, but for our industry, especially meat marketing, perhaps we should take stock about what we market and how we market in the future while also keeping an eye toward the past.

Past meat marketing lessons for today’s meat marketing managers

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