posted 9 years ago
Loosely, wholesale marketing is exactly what it sounds.
1) You have already grown a certain amount of something and you want to offload that certain amount in one shot, rather than try to retail it to individuals. A little risky, because you might not be able to find someone who wants or can handle the entire lot all at once, so you have to carry the costs of how long to maintain the remaining herd till you find another buyer or until the first one can buy and process the rest.
2) Or, you find your contact first, sign a contract agreement to provide that much meat in a certain time-frame, for a certain cost, so you know how many pigs you need to rear up and breed out all at once, rather than after the fact. There's generally less risk than trying to offload something you already have if you can't find buyers. However, you've signed a contract agreement to sell the meat to them at a certain rate, if the costs of feed for example have gone up, or you get injured and have to hire someone else to cover the work, you then generally can't raise your asking price to cover the extra expenses.
That enmasse and you'd need probably need to contact a slaughter house to do the deed to certify the meat for sale, most likely. Your slaughter house would likely know who around would be buying in bulk.
Average Market price for hogs and who will buy them in that amount depends on your local area.
You have to calculate your bottom line, of how much money for feed, labour, other costs and vet care, calculate how much it takes to maintain the 'herd' and then divide up by how many heads you have to sell, and that's the bare minimum that you'd need to take in to break even, per head. Sometimes that's below local market costs, so you can ask for a higher mark up to, make up your profits, sometimes, and often, it's more expensive than what the supermarket for example is asking for, and you tend to loose out, so you have to figure out a different way to market it to make the difference.
Ie. Here to me, no one would buy that much hog at once, we don't have private butchers in the area, and all the grocery stores are big-box corporate who wouldn't touch unincorporated farm meat. So you'd have to sell privately. We have a local farm that does it by the whole pig, or half pig, and delivers precut and packaged in trays and tied bread bags, roasts, rump, hocks, riblets, bacon cuts and a variety of options that include prepared sausage. They take out a flyer(printed on their own laser printer) and get it passed around, to pass customers and word of mouth, it's usually about 150$ for half a hog, and 300 for a whole, cdn. Now that we have a lot of ethnic people moving into the area, directly marketing to these folk often gets them to buy the entire hog, whole, it just needs cleaning, for whole hog-roast parties.
Ie. But if in your area you have a lot of ethnic markets going on, they would be the ones to approach.
It does all depend on who you could possible sell to. But wholesale usually won't get you the amount of prices you could demand for individual cuts of meat you've processed yourself, but processing meat for private retail does take time and freezer space, and possible government inspections of the kitchen and storage areas. But, for example you have a good recipie for sausage, you can process all the unpopular cuts into sausage instead, and charge generally more than what you could ask for the individual cuts. You have all that bacon, all at once, and hame/home smoked and cured, you can generally ask for more than the stores retail price.
If you don't have a local slaughter house, I recommend approaching game-meat preparer places, or at least, looking at their business model. These are places usually associated with hunting stores, that offers cold freezing and butchering services. For a price, they'd butcher your meet into cuts, then portion them and hard freeze them for transport home. They've very popular in rural areas. Tho be careful, some of them are professional and have pride in their butchering skills, others just freeze the body and go at it with a band saw, so when the cuts get thawed, the cut looks nothing like what you'd buy in a store. Many of them have their own instore specials that they then prepare the meat into sausages, jerky, seasoned and smoked cuts, and they have their own market based on that.
Not growing or raising anything at the moment, but I'm here doing research for the future.