Cutting to the Chase
By: Raoul Baxter
My Temple Grandin story
(The views and opinions expressed in this blog are strictly those of the author.)
I first met Temple Grandin over 25 years ago when I worked for Sara Lee, based out of their Kahn’s plant in Cincinnati, when we sorely needed her help. I literally had been thrown beef and hog procurement. The plant was built in the 1920s and was five stories high, the theory being that production would flow with gravity. However, equipment, technology and product flow changed over time. All of a sudden, product began to go against gravity, and we had a mess.
The real mess was in the way we had to move both cattle and hogs. Nothing at the Kahn’s plant was ever properly designed to receive the animals. There were numerous small pens, all square in design with open slats on the side. Trying to move hogs out of them was a nightmare.
I didn’t know much, except we needed to do things radically different. Back then, if you mentioned animal handling people would look at you like you had green monkeys coming out of your nose. I went to Bernard Ebbing, a consultant who specialized in improving meat quality, who told me he knew of someone who could help us redesign the stockyards. “She is a little different, but she is really thorough and understands animals,” he said.
About two weeks later Temple came in. She had her cowboy hat and boots, her notebook and her engineer equipment. She had been working almost exclusively with cattle, and within two days she had our cattle pens and drives solved. She would watch, go up to the engineers’ office, draw the designs of the system and then come down and implement them herself. This included retraining the stockyard handlers.
I had never seen anyone study pigs the way Temple did. She observed how they reacted to sound, to smell, to floors, to light on the floor, to movement in groups and into the stunners. Within a week she understood their psychology. Meanwhile, she was extremely practical. Her focus was to make systems better for the animals, the people who handled them and the quality of their meat. “Raoul,” she told me at the end of that week, “Kahn’s is going to have to gut these stockyards and start over, as the physical limitations will prevent any improvement.” She completely demolished and redesigned the whole the handling systems, from unloading to the restrainers.
Temple quickly realized that pigs rested against the side of their pens for security. Instead of square pens we now had long and narrow rectangle pens that one person could easily move hogs from with little excitement or noise. Then she realized, even then, that the modern pig raised in confinement was nearsighted. What would stop them dead in their tracks was to see light on the floor. Consequently all the pens were made out of solid concrete and metal. Anyone who has worked around pigs knows how destructive they can be, and these pens were built to last.
Temple was not and is not the only expert on the proper handling of animals. She was, however, one of the first who put values on proper handling that the CEO down to the hog drivers understood. Temple had an absolute belief in right and wrong. Maybe most important, she was honest. If you want her to stand up for you, you better have all of your ducks in a row and be doing the right things.
Burger King reportedly in buyout talks
By Dani Friedland on 9/1/2010
Burger King is in talks with New York-based private investment firm 3G Capital about a possible sale, according to The New York Times.
On the 3G side, former Latin American railroad executive Alexandre Behring is reportedly leading the deal to buy Burger King, which has a market value of $2.4 billion, according to The New York Times.
3G Capital held a 6.7 percent stake in Wendy’s in 2008, the Times reported.
TPG, Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs took Burger King private in 2002. It went public again in 2006, though the consortium still owns 32 percent of the company, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal initially reported that Burger King was in talks with London-based mid-market private equity firm 3i Group, which denied those reports to the Times.
Late Wednesday morning, Burger King’s stock price was up 15.81 percent. The Miami-based hamburger chain has more than 12,150 locations in 75 countries.
Veal video prompts Costco comment
By Lisa M. Keefe on 9/2/2010
Costco released a statement Wednesday in response to a video of veal calves in individual crates on an Ohio farm, made surreptitiously by a group called Mercy for Animals (MFA) and teed up as cruel and inhumane treatment of the animals.
The video singled out Costco and Giant Eagle as carrying the farm’s branded products. In a release, Costco CEO Jim Sinegal says, “The company had not been aware of the issue before we saw the video. We are extremely disappointed, not only with the performance of our supplier in this instance, but with our own performance as well.”
In fact, the farm in question, Buckeye Veal Farm in Apple Creek, Ohio, said Monday that it already had phased out most of the individual crate housing shown in the video in favor of group housing, and was continuing the process with the animals that remained in crates, according to a report in The Daily Record in Wooster, Ohio.
In any case, an agreement reached in June between the new Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board, authorized by a voter referendum late last year, also calls for phasing out veal crates. MFA is pressuring the board to move up the timeline for that to happen, The Daily Record reports.
On its website, MFA asks consumers to adopt a vegan diet, urge Costco and Giant Eagle to stop selling veal, urge the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board to “honor the common-sense agreement reached in June,” spread the word via social media, and make a donation to the group.
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