McDonald's Sustainable Beef Pilot - Information Sharing Initiative Project

The third criteria for the Food Principle of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB) is, “Information should be shared both up and down the value chain to provide opportunities for participants to improve their businesses, while respecting confidentiality.”

As part of the Pilot, McDonald’s supported an initiative to evaluate the potential usefulness of data sharing with stakeholders in the Canadian beef community. To that end, McDonald’s partnered with Beefbooster and BIXS to enlist the help of two professionals from Livestock Gentec. Together, they analyzed the nearly two million records packing plants entered into the Beef Information Exchange System (BIXS) from 2012 to 2014 as part of a federally sponsored project. They then cross-referenced those records with a proprietary set of data linking individual RFIDs from Beefbooster cattle to their sires and dams.

This initiative created the first opportunity for a specific group of producers to analyze a subset of their raw data within BIXS and transform it into meaningful information. The analysis was intended to be a high level examination without multiple scenarios and sensitivities being run. It was not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of potential impacts on individual ranches, feedlots and packers’ particular business models and relationships in the market. It is hoped to serve as a catalyst for future information sharing opportunities for any interested members of the Canadian beef community. 

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