Inventory Fluctuations

  "Why can't I get sausage?  You've never been out of sausage!" the patron exclaimed.  Or eggs in November?

One of the biggest differences between Polyface and Wal-Mart is that we don't fill inventory gaps from a warehouse.  

Harvard Business Review analyzed craft versus commodity and the contrasts are significant.  Craft is all about differentiation while commodity is all about sameness.

Industrial chicken is the same everyplace in the world.  Ditto pork, tomatoes, whatever.  Commodity industrial food is homogenous; a bushel of commodity corn is the same no matter what field it came from.  

But craft is all about something different.

The business analysts determined that while both craft and commodity are viable models, neither works in crossover.  In other words, when a commodity tries to paint itself as a craft or when a craft tries to become a commodity, it just doesn't work.

Because Polyface is a craft business, we can't call up any old warehouse and shore up inventory valleys.  Part of our distinctive is flowing with the seasons.  

This is most obvious with eggs.  Our laying hens aren't in a confinement factory under light control.  The sun actually wakes up our chickens and puts them to bed.

When day length shortens, they naturally reduce production and when it lengthens, they increase production.  That's why in the spring we have eggs running out our ears and in November and December, we're always short.  

Some pastured producers put lights on them even out in the field, but we don't.  We believe the natural cycle is important to let the bird rest from her high production labors, regain strength and stamina, and build up a reserve for the flush of spring production.

Last spring, for the first time, we began freeze-drying those excess spring eggs and now offer them in little baggies to help fill the early winter shortfall.   

Believe me, everyone around here lives for Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year.  Within a week, we see the hens perk up and by early February production is wonderful.

The industry uses lights to extend day length from the beginning of laying until lights are on them nearly 24 hours a day and the birds burn out (lay themselves to death) within a year.  How much energy can your egg offer you if the hen's nutrition can't keep up?

Beyond seasonality is the lag time between birth and harvest.  Different animals have different grow-out times.  Broilers are the fastest at 8 weeks.  Turkeys are next at 16 weeks.  Pigs are 8 months and beef is 2 years or more.  

If more patrons come our way and product demand increases, we have to adjust our pipeline on the front end.  That means calling a hatchery for more chicks.  Or contacting our handful of farrowers for more piggies.  Or in the case of beef, finding more pasture to be able to handle more cows to birth more calves.

In other words, we can't turn inventory on a dime.  

Over the course of our history, we've had overages and they aren't fun.  When you're throwing away perfectly good food, like feeding 1,000 dozen eggs to pigs in the spring, it makes you conservative toward expansion.  The only thing worse than saying "we're out" is taking what we've already produced and dumping it.

Because craft producers can't access the industrial inventory pool, we have to invest and adjust based on our best guess looking a year or two in the future.  Sometimes our estimate is on the mark and other times it's off.  But we don't have salvage buyers to take overages and we certainly aren't going to call any conventional outfit to supplement our shortfall. (When we have those overages, we do donate to all the local food shelters etc. as a way to help the community.)

This year several things have come together to create some inventory shortages.  

One was our revamped website in January 2024. The upsurge in purchases has been both gratifying and surprising.  We didn't realize the dramatic effect we'd see by addressing website clunkiness.  We listened to you; we adjusted; you responded; thank you.

As purchasing became easier, patrons became more confident to encourage friends to get better food from us.  Nobody wants to recommend something frustrating. Making our website easier to use encouraged endorsements.  Again, thank you.

The other thing that happened was a year of recalls. Whenever people die or get sick from pathogens in industrial food (federally inspected, by the way) our phone rings off the hook.  The last few months have seen some dramatic pathogen outbreaks in the industrial sector, highlighting the Polyface refuge.

Inventory is like a huge slinky.  With media attention and the speed of electronic access, the ability of the market to change is much faster than a craft supplier can adjust.  So what do YOU do?

My suggestion is to eat what's plentiful.  

No inventory gets short across the various items all at once.  While we may be short of ground beef, for example, we might have a mountain of chuck roast.  

While we may be out of boneless skinless chicken breast, we might have a mountain of whole broilers. 

Obviously, we try to foresee the various flows of the various options, like an inventory within an inventory.  But when you suddenly have someone ask for 100 ribeye steaks in a month, you can't foresee that.  Also, keep in mind we can adjust the shorter growth period animals faster than the longer growth.

Right now we anticipate being low on beef for a while due to its long production horizon.  Thankfully, chicken and pork will be fine fairly soon.  

At our house, we tend to eat what's plentiful.  That's how we determine our menu.  Look in the freezer and whatever stack is the highest, fix that for supper.

This is one reason many craft livestock producers only sell set shares, also known as "boxes", where you don't get to pick what you want.  You get what the farmer puts in the box.  At Polyface, we have elected to give you more choices, but the flip side of that choice is that we use our best future-estimating to adjust the various options going into our inventory.  

We don't want to tell you what you'll eat.  To do that, we need you to partner with us in responding to what we have.

I encourage all of us on this land-and-nutrition-healing team to think that way.  Let's all challenge ourselves to step out of our routine a bit.  Reach out to our patron support team and we can steer you to those items plentiful in the current season.  

Thank you for partnering with us. 

-Joel