The Henningsen Cold Storage Co. warehouse in Stilwell, Oklahoma, was so jammed with frozen turkeys from the likes of Butterball LLC and Cargill Inc. this year that manager Scott Mayberry turned down requests to store about 1 million more birds, or double his inventory.
“We didn’t have any room,” said Mayberry, who manages 3.5 million cubic feet of space that is the size of two Home Depot Inc. (HD) stores and usually holds as much as 20 million pounds (9,072 metric tons) of frozen turkeys before the Thanksgiving holiday in November, the peak for U.S. demand.
Rising output last year and slowing sales left domestic stockpiles tracked by the government at four-year highs in August and September. That signals deeper seasonal discounts on retail prices that are the highest on record going back to 1980, because about 85 percent of the 46 million birds Americans eat at Thanksgiving meals are frozen rather than fresh, according to the National Turkey Federation.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Bloomberg