During CattleCon 2025, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, visited with the President of Certified Angus Beef, John Stika, about domestic beef demand and the willingness of consumers to pay for quality.
Coverage of CattleCon 2025 is powered by Farm Data Services of Stillwater, Oklahoma.
“We are producing a record percent of choice and prime at around eighty-three to eighty-four percent of our inventory is choice and prime,” Stika shared. “We have listened to what consumers have said they wanted, and that is taste and quality, and that has translated into being reflected in our genetics, management, and ultimately into the carcasses that we send to the packer. It gets translated into real dollars. It has been really exciting to see.”
He noted how many more requests for CAB have been received under the current market than in years before which is indicative of a customer who is price-conscious but also willing to pay more for a higher quality product.
He detailed how retailers and food service establishments want to deliver price value and taste quality to customers, but that value proposition is also influenced by how consumers feel about how producers raise their cattle from a humane treatment and environmental stewardship standpoint.
Stika shared, “We continue to stay very focused on communicating those messages and earlier this year, we launched a partnership with the Noble Research Institute with an online educational program focused on land stewardship. The other thing we have done is we have been behind the Beef Quality Assurance program for a long, long time.”
As a brand, CAB doesn’t have direct contact with consumers, but retailers, food service distributors, the restaurant community, and meat case butchers are the ones communicating these messages about the products.
“We have been heavily focused on training them and arming them with the talking points that we know can make them more effective at getting a customer to trade up to Certified Angus Beef, because that value in taste and quality is there for a higher price,” Stika said.
CAB Prime experienced the largest growth in the brand in 2024. Prime makes up about 50 to 55 million pounds of CAB’s total 1.2 – 1.3 billion pounds of beef sold. “It is one of the fastest growing, highest demand categories of our business,” Stika detailed. “When you look at where we are at as an industry, with regards to percent Choice and Prime, we believe that even as cattle numbers come down, when you look at the genetic focus on quality and where the dollars are on a grid, we are going to see an increase on Prime carcass availability this next year even as the total population of fed cattle goes down.”
Stika’s evaluation of the coming market conditions portrays tight cattle numbers, economic support for high-quality products will remain, and demand for Angus genetics will continue to grow.
“We believe that there is still ample room to continue to grow from a brand-sales standpoint,” he said. “I mentioned Certified Angus Beef Prime; we believe that is a significant growth tool for us during a period of tight supplies for our overall business. We just ask our partners to not trade down in quality. Don’t make the decision for the consumer that price has exceeded value and find yourself selling a lower quality product for a lower margin when you could have put a higher quality product at a higher margin, but fair price and benefitted the consumer and their own bottom lines.”
The premiums are then driven back to feeders and producers across the country. “Quality is important regardless of if we have a lot of cattle or a handful of cattle, and consumers want it, and they are willing to pay more for it,” Stika concluded.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
