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You have the data. The question is what to do with it on Tuesday.

HighLine Insights is the weekly read for protein industry leaders who are tired of dashboards that describe the market and want one that helps them act on it. Beef, pork, chicken. Cutout to contract. Every Tuesday morning, before the week gets loud.

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Remember when the fundamentals told a story?

The market is not cooperating, and a generation of buyers was not trained for that.

Three vendors send three reads on the same week. Operations needs a coverage call by Wednesday. The CFO wants to know why last quarter’s program is sideways. Sales is leaning on procurement to hold a price the market ran past weeks ago. Everyone has data. Nobody agrees on what it means.

Access to information was supposed to fix this. It did not. The noise is deafening, the contradictions are louder than the signals, and the gap between knowing what the market did and knowing what to do about it keeps getting wider. Buyers who came up on dashboards do not have the muscle memory their predecessors built over decades of cycles, because the market they trade today does not behave the way the fundamentals say it should.

HighLine Insights closes that gap. Every week we take the slaughter numbers, the cutout, the trade flows, the tariff news, the weather, and the retail signals, and we tell you what they mean for the decisions you are about to make. Not a recap. A read. The kind of read a buyer used to get from the veteran two desks over, before that desk went quiet.

This week, in case you missed it

The last three issues. Each one written for a buyer who has to make a call before lunch.

Wrong Investigation, Wrong Target Part 2
May 14, 2026
Special Edition, Part 2 of 2. If the packer tier is bleeding losses and the cow-calf tier is at records, who is collecting the consumer's beef dollar? The USDA Economic Research Service Meat Price Spreads dataset shows the wholesale-to-retail beef spread has roughly quadrupled in nominal terms since 2000, from $0.94 per pound to $3.88 per pound through April 2026 YTD. The retail tier is itself concentrated, with the top five United States grocery chains controlling roughly 48 percent of food-at-home sales, and pass-through from wholesale to retail is empirically asymmetric. This issue makes the case that the DOJ inquiry is pointed at the wrong tier of the supply chain.
Read full issue →
Wrong Investigation, Wrong Target
May 13, 2026
Special Edition, Part 1 of 2. The DOJ has opened a second antitrust probe of the Big Four beef packers in five years. The SEC filings show ten quarters of packer beef-segment losses. The cow-calf cohort the investigation purports to defend is posting record margins. The data point to the wrong tier of the supply chain.
Read full issue →
HighLine Insights Issue 9: Has US Foods Solved Inflation?
May 8, 2026
Reading between the lines of Q1 earnings. Tyson posted a $202M quarterly adjusted operating loss, McDonald's and Shake Shack reported beef prices up double digits, and BLS pegged Meat, Poultry, and Fish CPI up 5.6% year over year. Then US Foods reported total food cost inflation at 1%. This issue digs into how the USFD procurement team pulled that off, what McDonald's pivot toward chicken means for hamburger demand on the other side of the cattle rebuild, and why a $1.06B aggregate Tyson beef segment loss complicates the antitrust narrative.
Read full issue →

Three ways in. Pick the one that matches the question on your desk.

01

HighLine Insights

The weekly read. Every Tuesday morning. Beef, pork, chicken, plus what the macro is doing to all three. Free. Built for the buyer who needs the read before the noon meeting and a steadier hand for the week ahead.

02

HighLine Insights Pro

Goes past the weekly into the questions that are too big for an issue. Grilling season. Holiday programs. The next round of tariffs. China. Brazil. The cycles inside the cycles. Priced, because the work is. Built for the team that needs to move with conviction when the fundamentals are not telling a clean story.

03

HighLine Signal

The customized weekly read. Built for the operator whose questions are too specific for a general newsletter and too recurring for a one-off project. We take your supply chain, your customers, your cost structure, and your contracts, and we deliver the weekly read tailored to your book. Strategy calls and contract guidance bundled in, sized to your needs. By consultation. For the leader who wants the muscle memory of thirty years on the desk next to their team’s, every week.

For sponsored leadership development and bespoke advisory engagements, contact us directly.

Michael DiSabato, Founder of HighLine Consulting Group

Michael DiSabato

Michael has spent more than thirty years inside the protein supply chain. Buyer side, seller side, slaughter floor, butcher’s block, aging room, customer table. He has lived through the cycles, run the procurement books, and watched the industry move from relationship-and-rolodex to dashboard-and-data. He started HighLine because the playbook is shifting hands. The leaders who built the modern protein industry are handing the keys to a generation that grew up with more data and fewer reps. The numbers are sharper than they have ever been. The muscle memory for what to do when the numbers stop making sense is not. HighLine exists to bridge that gap, week by week, decision by decision.

More on Michael

Where Michael shows up

Michael joined Damian Mason on The Business of Agriculture to make ten predictions about where US ag is headed through 2026. The ones about beef, China, and consumer behavior already look prescient. The rest, you can decide.

Watch the conversation on YouTube
Read inside the rooms that move the industry

Tuesday morning. The read before the meeting.

HighLine Insights lands in your inbox before the week gets loud. Built for buyers who want the muscle memory of thirty years on the desk next to their data. Subscribe and the next issue is the next one you read.