Nice to Meat Ya: Bruce Longo

OK, that won’t make sense for a few lines here, but stay with me. These days, Bruce has a lot to do with the price of a PISMO and everything else in the boxes.

We know from experience when something is worth the premium price, right? That’s why consumers pay enough extra to enjoy the Certified Angus Beef® (CAB®) brand, which is why packers pay cattlemen $50 million each year to get more of it.

But how does the beef trade know what middle meats and end meats and grinds are worth, for Select, Choice, Prime and CAB? Two words: Urner Barry.

Bruce is the boxed beef reporter for Urner Barry (founded 1858), and in that trade, a whole tenderloin that is peeled, side meat on, is called a PSMO and often pronounced with the inferred “i.”  Now, about those wheel chairs…

He’s worn a lot of hats since graduating from the college formerly known as Glassboro (NJ) State College. It’s Rowan University now, since that family donated $100 million. I know because Bruce told me, admitting that if I donated $100 million to him, he’d “change my name to Steve Suther.”

Bruce and I digress a lot when not reporting (he is no better than 3^rd in NJ Bruces, after Springsteen and Willis), so I learned that he used his degree in physical education to work in the health spa and rehab fields. He sold a lot of customized wheel chairs and related equipment for several companies from Delaware to Connecticut and Philly to Albany before starting his own company based in his home town of Tom’s River, NJ, in the 1990s.

In very indirect ways, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, changed his life, but only because single-occupant vehicles were not allowed through the tunnel to New York until after 10 each morning for a while, and it became increasingly hard to keep up business obligations. Well, it turns out his home town is also home to Urner Barry, and Bruce often talked to company president Paul Brown Jr., saying he’d be interested if a job opened up at the highly rated, family-run business.

His wife Jennifer (who uses her Phys-Ed degree from Glassboro to teach Phys-Ed) was reading the classifieds before going off to watch daughter Ali swim at the YMCA in 2003 when she called out, “Bruce, Urner Barry has an opening!”

He was soon selling the array of informational products all over the area, but one day in his first year there, he took a call asking if he’d like to move over to the reporting side. After nearly 30 years in sales, Bruce knew success was all about relationships. It was the same in reporting, of course.

“There was a bit of a disconnect at first, going from sales to beef price reporting, not coming from the product or agriculture side,” he says. “And what’s that cattle cycle about?

“But reporting on a market is a lot of relationship stuff. People trust you if you do it the right way – it’s the trust we build with our contacts who give us the information,” Bruce says.

Urner Barry is the exclusive market news provider of CAB boxed beef prices, and the only basis for our quoting the premium over USDA Choice or Select.

“The success of CAB makes it easy to report; people understand the premium it brings and they are very much at ease and ready to report it,” he says.

With more than 10 years at that desk now (and seven as Human Resources Director, but we won’t get into that), the information Bruce reports each day literally moves the boxed beef market, as the thousands of subscribers spot trends early on and take action to buy or sell.

He’s watched the cattle cycle turn, seen it digress from drought and “$8 corn” to the threshold of expansion. So he figures 2015 prices should look a lot like 2014 “from what we can see today,” with the first inkling of lower prices in 2016.

Through the next turn, Bruce sees premium beef retaining its edge in the market: “Once you’ve driven a Cadillac or Porsche, you don’t go back to a base Chevrolet.”

Thanks to Bruce and the dedicated team at Urner Barry, we can track the dollars this brand adds to the value of your Angus cattle.

–Steve

You may also like