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Mythbuster Monday gets to the bottom of CAB’s acceptance rate hike

You’ve heard this before: Often times if it seems too good to be true, it is. Like in the case of low-fat ice cream that claims the same taste as the original. (Whatever you do, don’t buy it folks. Get the real deal—trust me!) But sometimes the stars line up and you get a “too good to be true” moment that is, ironically, genuine. Just like the sunshiny, wind-free, 70° day I spent in Colorado in February.

Or like the rise in Certified Angus Beef ® (CAB®) acceptance rates.

Following that theme, Laura recently picked up this myth from the road:

Myth—Since CAB has had such a dramatic rise in acceptance rate, you must have lowered your standards.

Fact—CAB is a quality-based program and is following a similar nationwide upswing in cattle grading. Two years ago our own Larry Corah and Mark McCully authored a white paper that looked at various explanations for that spike, including good feeding conditions, changes in compositional endpoint, more heifers in the harvest mix and,perhaps most encouraging,changes in genetics.

So this is what U.S. quality grade trends look like:

And here is a chart of CAB”s growth:

To get real specific about CAB’s quality-based specifications—the rite of passage for entry into the brand—they’ve never really changed. A time or two they’ve been tightened to better screen out dairy or bos indicus genetics and in 2006, we did adjust by decoupling what was a Yield Grade (YG) limit to consider the components of YG separately. That delivers more consistency in the box. So the YG3.9 or better spec became less than 1 inch backfat, a 10 to 16 square inch ribeye and less than 1,000 lb. hot carcass weight. That increase in uniformity was welcomed by our end-users, and doubtless led to greater demand for product.

It’s true that change pulled in product that wouldn’t have made CAB under the straight YG spec, but it also excludes other product that would have previously been accepted.

Simplistically, some might think in the last 5 years we’ve loaded up on YG4 carcasses for the brand. Evidence continues to suggest otherwise. In fact, on a conference call just this morning, we looked at 2010 yearend numbers from our Feedlot Licensing Program that showed YG4s are down compared to the previous year (from 14.3% to 9.8%). At the same time CAB acceptance rate on conventional cattle fed through partner yards increased by almost 3 percentage points.

The supply development team likes to joke that the increase in acceptance rates is because we’re so darn good at our jobs (you know, increasing supply), but really we know it’s because the cattle producers are so good at their jobs. They’ve implemented genetic and management programs aimed at hitting quality targets and they’re getting more precise all the time.

May your bottom line be filled with black ink,

~Miranda

PS–Check out these feature stories if you want to read about some of those standpout producers: