“Ractopamine-free” may be the next popular claim on the packages of pork products, but the shift would come with a price.
Both JBS USA and Tyson Fresh Meats announced earlier this month that the companies would phase ractopamine, a feed additive that promotes lean growth in pigs, out of their supply chains. With that, they joined Smithfield and Seaboard Triumph Foods as major U.S. pork producers that eschew the additive.
Hormel Foods has not made a similar announcement yet. In response to a Meatingplace inquiry, the company shared a statement: “We are currently reviewing this with our domestic supply chain and are in discussions with our grower supplier base.”
The immediate impetus for eliminating ractopamine, which has added substantial value to the hog carcass, is to help gain access to the mainland China market where pork produced with ractopamine is banned. Hog herds across Asia have been decimated by an epidemic of African Swine Fever which, while posing no threat to humans, is deadly to the animals. Rabobank has estimated that as much as half of China’s hog herd — historically the world’s largest — will ultimately be affected or culled in efforts to contain the disease’s spread.
But backing off of ractopamine use is to retreat from a technology that has boosted the efficiency and lowered the cost of pork production in the U.S. tremendously, said market analyst John Nalivka, founder of Sterling Marketing in Vale, Ore.
“I don’t think [eliminating ractopamine] is in passing. These are changes that seem to be becoming permanent,” he said in an interview. “I put that in line with animal antibiotics, welfare, a lot of things that the world has changed with regard to how we’re going to raise livestock and produce meat.”
As ractopamine is removed from a growing percentage of the pork produced in the U.S. for any market, Nalivka warned, it will bump pork prices higher.
“I’m not saying if Tyson takes out the ractopamine, that the price of pork goes up 10%. It’s more gradual than that, and ractopamine is just one more thing on the list,” he said. “You start adding up all these things and you say one day, ‘Hey, we’re not as efficient at producing pork or beef or chicken as we used to be.’”
In the U.S., where most conventionally raised hogs are fed with ractopamine, consumers can opt for organically raised or “natural” pork instead, and pay a higher price, Nalivka said. Which sheds some light on the economic shift in store across the board if processors continue to back the additive out of their supply chains: “You change the entire value of the carcass.”