If you aren’t familiar with the request “Honey, get the gate” emanating from the tired cattle rancher as he pulls his truck up to a closed fence gate through which he and his missus must pass, you are either too old, too young or too deaf in either tone or time.

It’s a tired, worn-out request that has become an affront to the distaff members of the cattle ranching community. It may have been a casual offhand remark in the past, but it is now a symbol demanding a wholesale change in women’s role in our beef industry.

As you are reading this today, I am giving a talk titled “Establishing Consumer Trust” at the International Stockmen’s Exposition (ISE) in Houston, which is part of the annual International Livestock Congress. Here’s part of what I am telling the assembled cattle ranching crowd:

Aside from a needed dynamic change in beef marketing strategy, there are two things that can help the beef industry both establish or regain trust. First, integrate; and, second, pass the torch of management to a new generation and gender.

The mere suggestion of integrating the cattle/beef production continuum is cause for visceral disagreements. However, if the chicken industry can integrate from conception to almost consumption, why can’t the beef industry? We can and we should! Why? Since integrating and establishing brands, chicken has surpassed beef in both per capita consumption and demand, while the beef industry lost 25% of its consumer volume.

The “island” or “silo” cattle production system has been a blockade to integrating these disparate beef production parts into one or, at the most, two profit centers. Redundant costs are driven out of a combined and integrated profit center, efficiencies are gained, and profits are restored.

Regarding the “torch passing,” by bringing both a younger generation and women to the forefront of managing throughout the largest to the smallest beef companies, growth is established or enhanced.

Today, men overwhelmingly manage the beef industry. At the pinnacle of today’s largest beef companies, the managers are men, exclusively, some of whom skew towards the Social Security/Medicare set. These “older” men manage without the benefit of youth and its naïve wisdom. If these “older” managers expect their companies to understand, relate to and market to Millennials, Gen Y and Gen Alpha, their future beef consumers, they must abdicate in favor of Gen X and Millennial managers. Sure, these youthful enthusiasts will make mistakes, but isn’t that the way you, too, learned?

Why do I also say that more women are needed to manage beef companies? It’s quite simple, really. Women purchase the food. Supermarket News (4-19-2023) reports that 78% of women identify as the primary household shopper. Of more importance, over half of female consumers make final product selections in male-centric categories — like beef. And, not surprisingly, women are more trusted to tell the truth about food.

Women are closer to and understand beef consumers, who are also predominantly women, better than any man can. Such women as managers can make more informed decisions about managing a beef company’s growth.

A study from consultant McKinsey and Co. noted that companies with a higher percentage of women in top management have better financial performance. But, of the eight top beef processors, not one had a woman as CEO or President as reported in the National Provisioner’s Top 100 Producers.

As evidence of successful women CEO’s, Fortune Magazine’s 2014 list of the 50 most powerful women in business included two from food and beverage companies: Irene Rosenfeld, CEO of Kraft Foods, who revitalized it from a moribund past into a profitable future; and Indira Nooyi, who after becoming CEO of Pepsico, managed it to surpass Coca Cola in market value.

Within the last few years, there seems to be a spate of proposed new beef processing plants. I reviewed a number of these new beef plant proposals and found that none listed marketing or where the beef was going to be sold in the prospectuses. But all of them listed the production efforts they would be making to produce beef. And, not one listed a woman in top management, much less even close to being the CEO/President.

It's time for a change in the beef industry if we want to regain growth and sustained profitability.

No more 'Honey, get the gate'

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