David Foote on Stanbroke, ACC, Brahmans and the 'kerfuffle' MSA initially caused

Beef industry stalwart David Foote spoke at the Australian Brahman Breeders' Association dinner held in conjunction with the Royal Queensland Show.

The moral of his story: the customer is truly king, there's no way forward without embracing science and management without measurement is just intuitive guesswork.

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Mr Foote has spent the past quarter of a century with Australian Country Choice, which has 1400 staff, 42 properties, a quarter of a million cattle, three feedlots and an abattoir in Brisbane.

But he has a lifetime of work under his belt in leadership roles across most states in seedstock and commercial cattle, sheep, wool, fodder production, manufactured stockfeed for export, meat retailing and branded beef exporting.

It was his time with Queensland company Stanbroke and then ACC in the mid 1990s, when Australia's world-leading meat eating quality grading system Meat Standards Australia was launched, that he spoke most about at the Brisbane Ekka event.

Stanbroke was ACC's single largest supplier of yearlings for their Coles business in the mid '90s. It did this with a herd of 320,000 Brahmans and 180,000 Santa Gertrudis cattle.

MSA and its much-touted 'empty chair' representing the nameless consumer caused nothing short of a kerfuffle in the northern cattle industry, Mr Foote said.

"Was it potentially the death of the Brahman breed?" he said.

Mr Foote and others, determined to prove the MSA advocates with their empty chair wrong, headed off to the United States to gather intelligence.

They heard about the performance of breeds under the new eating quality regime, about new tools objectively measuring tenderness and about consumer testing which was showing flavour, juiciness and tenderness was now being demanded in spades.

"The tide was coming in and we realised we had two choices: we could put our heads in the sand and say the rest of the world is wrong and we are not changing or we could start to implement measured changes to improve the consumer outcomes from our products," Mr Foote said.

"Outside of live export, ACC was probably the largest volume buyer of Brahman and Brahman-cross heifers at the time, with over 30,000 on feed supplying it's Cannon Hill abattoir.

"The very public introduction of MSA awakened Coles to closely assessing how the northern beef supply chain was meeting the expectations of their customers. When measured, it simply wasn't.

"In our first try, we killed 1100 yearling heifers fed for 65 days and only 39 graded positively so we knew we had to do something different."

What ACC did to meet the emerging expectations was closely investigate its live cattle selection, backgrounder management, feeding regimes and processing practices and technologies.

"A tweak of each along with embedded disciplines - and no room for emotion - gave rise to a supply chain that achieved all that Coles wanted," Mr Foote said.

In fact, as measured, it outperformed the eating quality of their southern supply chain of predominantly Angus, Hereford and their crosses.

Mr Foote said the three biggest influencers for improvement were weight-for-age maturity of cattle entering the feedlot, no HGP (hormone growth promotant) use in the feedlot and electrical stimulation and tender stretching at processing.

That famous 'empty chair' is today well catered for, Mr Foote believes.

He pointed to the significant measured predictability available to all participants in the beef supply chain.

Angus herd book registrations were up 44 per cent in the past ten years, Wagyu an incredible 545pc in the same period, Brahmans were up 15pc and Santas up 5pc.

Those changes were a real signal to the future of how both the purebred and crossbred herd in Australia was gently evolving toward to a more consumer-driven end product, Mr Foote argued.

Those who breed and raise cattle today are either seedstock producers, self-replacing herd managers or food suppliers - remembering that live export is simply the transport leg to get an animal somewhere else to be eaten, he said.

The key today is to make those three production systems efficient, sustainable, relevant and profitable - all while placing the customer first.

"In my less than humble opinion it's not complicated and there are any number of tools and support available to help predictively measure and improve," he said.