Jacob Kremple

I was at a restaurant the other weekend in the city and they had a strip steak on the menu for like $120.

For a strip steak.

I love a strip steak, but that's crazy.

Yeah.

But people are still paying that, which is crazy.

The demand for beef is not slowing down, even though these prices are getting so high.

Yeah.

But if you look at retail versus wholesale, the cutout, the difference between the retail price of beef and the wholesale price of beef is at the highest that it's ever been, both in a dollar perspective and a percent perspective.

Yeah.

Go back 20 years, the difference between the price per pound of beef at wholesale and retail is probably 30%.

Now it's probably closer to 40, 45%.

Really?

Yeah.

So again, retailers are sort of like building on this momentum of this idea of like this, you know, lack of consumer knowledge of what the market really is.

And that's something we can't play in the food service side of the business.

We're up like a rocket, down like a rock.

Because our...

chefs and some of the buying teams that they have are much more knowledgeable about markets than the average consumer is.

They're going to log on to the USDA website and look at prices.

They're going to be talking with some of our farmers and growers about fuel projections as well with some of them.