A look inside Woolworths' Greenstock red meat supply chain | Farm Online
Woolworths has opened the doors to its red meat supply chain in a way that has never before been done by a supermarket in Australia.
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00:00Against a backdrop of intense scrutiny on supermarkets and how they deal with
00:04farmers, Woolworths has opened the doors to its red meat supply chain in a way
00:09that has never before been done by a supermarket in Australia. Its standalone
00:13red meat business, Greenstock, is cutting-edge. It employs state-of-the-art
00:17technology at every step and livestock sourcing is a key component.
00:22Greenstock's Managing Director, Anna Speer, says building long-term sustainable
00:26partnerships with producers is key. We work with more than two and a half
00:30thousand farmers, more than 100 feedlots and 12 primary processors across
00:34Australia to deliver 3.4 million kilos of meat to Woolworths customers every
00:40week. This is approximately 5 million packets of meat per week and we do this
00:45through an exclusive secondary manufacturing partnership with Fulton
00:49Global Foods. Together we provide Australian families with high-quality
00:53affordable Australian beef, lamb and pork. To be specific, we buy approximately
00:58eight and a half thousand head of cattle, 14,000 pigs and 28,000 lambs every week.
01:04For producers, a contract with Woolies provides certainty and margin that has
01:08allowed for investment in everything from feedlots to tree planting. Lambs are
01:12purchased at 24 kilograms carcass weight using a combination of forward contracts,
01:17over-the-hooks and sale yard buying. Our relationship with Woolies has taken this
01:22business to another level and we now, our whole production system is based
01:27upon meeting the specifications through delivery to stall for Woolworths and we
01:34now, instead of thinking of just simply selling them, we're thinking of the
01:38product that comes out the other end. The majority of beef purchased is 70-day
01:44275 kilogram carcass weight MSA graded. In processing, Woolworths contracts can
01:50account for a third of throughput and they have also underpinned significant
01:54investments such as a new automated coal store development at TFI's Storr plant.
01:58The new coal store project that we've initiated at Storr, it's very exciting
02:04obviously, the automation of this facility is world-class and you know it
02:11has a great reduction in labour. The most important thing is just the unbroken coal
02:15chain and it has complete market access today, particularly the markets like
02:19China. It has to be an unbroken coal chain with all the back-end, the cold
02:24store, the chilling and freezing, you know totally integrated. So we're looking very
02:29forward to you know when this will be totally commissioned in several weeks
02:33time. At Tongala, Greenhams is processing around 14% of beef in the
02:38green stock network. The brand new facility started operations this year
02:42and includes co-generation utilising biogas off its ponds and around 30% of
02:48energy usage is provided by renewables. We decided we needed to invest here at
02:52Tongala just due to the the amount of dairy cows that were available in this
02:57area and so the board decided that we needed to do high-quality cattle like
03:01what we're doing in other facilities that we own in Tasmania and
03:04Gippsland and so on the journey we designed it and around around 700-800
03:11cattle a day and halfway through that journey we had Woolworths come to us and
03:16asking us to be a strategic partner in the facility and to have a
03:21service kill here and we put a price in and we were successful and so
03:26you know it's a great partnership here with Woolies and we've got
03:31close to a third of this facility here is Woolworths kill. The next
03:35step of the supply chain is incredible. World-class automation and secondary
03:40meat manufacturing happens at the Hilton Foods Melbourne site. Highly automated
03:44production lines featuring everything from smart slicing tech guarantee and
03:48consistent portion control to x-ray scanning for food safety to deliver 2.2
03:54million packets of meat to more than 500 Woolies stores a week. Robots programmed
03:59with consumer demand data from each individual store select what is required
04:03and have it ready to transfer on pallets to the Woolworths distribution centre.
04:08There are two other Hilton sites around the country at Brisbane in Queensland
04:12and Bunbury in WA. The degree of precision efficiency and technology is
04:17breathtaking.