Lost at Sea: Can the U.S. regain maritime dominance?
Art of Supply
“Today, the U.S. ranks 19th in the world in commercial shipbuilding, and we build less than 5 ships each year, while the PRC is building more than 1,700 ships. In 1975, the United States ranked number one, and we were building more than 70 ships a year.” - Katherine Tai, U.S. Trade Representative (2021-2025) The Trump Administration is on a mission to make shipbuilding great again… a bipartisan effort that started during the Biden Administration. In the spring of 2024, the U.S. Trade Representative released the findings and recommendations of a Section 301 investigation into whether or...
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From Billable Hours to Measurable Impact: The GSA’s Push for Outcome-Based Contracts
Art of Supply
“If you’re as good as you say you are, you should be able to keep your cost structure down, deliver the mission and the outcome, and still make a margin.” - Josh Gruenbaum, Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the GSA The General Services Administration (GSA), responsible for Federal contracting, has been making DOGE-style headlines of their own this year. In late June, they sent a letter to a number of large consulting firms under contract, looking for opportunities to reduce spending and better understand the work that is underway. Josh Gruenbaum, who is overseeing the...
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Coming Unchained to Embrace Global Supply Networks W/ Tim Richardson
Art of Supply
“We've had this whole period of trying to manage supply chains for lowest cost, whereas I think now we're managing for resilience at a managed cost and at an acceptable cost.” - Tim Richardson, Founder and CEO, Iter Consulting Supply chains aren't really chains anymore. They're complex, interconnected networks. Supply networks are anything but predictable. What used to be straightforward relationships between suppliers and customers have become webs of interconnected partnerships, each with its own risks and opportunities. The leaders and teams who succeed in this environment...
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What Restaurants Can Teach Us About Procurement & Supply Chain
Art of Supply
“The way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and we found, over and over, that precision in the smallest of details translated to precision in the bigger ones.” - Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality There are a lot of opportunities for crossover learning between running a restaurant and working in procurement or supply chain. Both fields are highly operational and process driven, not to mention measured by known, benchmarkable performance metrics. In the book “Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than They Expect” by Will Guidara, we...
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Making the Pivot to AI-enabled Global Sourcing W/ Anthony Sardain
Art of Supply
“There is a world where we can have a much more dynamic supply chain. Certainly, the current set of brands that are experiencing the squeeze from the tariffs would definitely benefit from being able to pivot their supply chain pretty quickly.” - Anthony Sardain, Founder and CEO of Cavela For all of the enthusiasm about AI, global sourcing is one of the processes that has remained predominantly human. Between the complexity of specifications and the relationship-based exchanges of information, it has been too ‘messy’ for straight automation - until now. Anthony Sardain is the founder...
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Remembering Fred Smith: FedEx Founder & Supply Chain Visionary
Art of Supply
“Life is short and it ends, the clock is ticking. Don’t get all wrapped up in your personal self, that’s a very unhealthy thing to do.” - Fred Smith, Founder of FedEx (1944 - 2025) On June 21, 2025, the business world - more specifically the supply chain world - lost a giant. FedEx Founder Fred Smith passed away at the age of 80. Frederick Wallace Smith was born in Marks, Mississippi in 1944. According to common anecdotes, he first imagined a company that could provide overnight delivery for an economics paper he wrote while studying at Yale in 1965 - and he got a C because the...
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How Transportation & Logistics Companies Are Tackling Network Security W/ Ken Rutsky
Art of Supply
“This is a long standing discussion within the networking and security industry: is there a perimeter? I think the reality is the perimeter still exists because it's a data and logical perimeter, but it doesn't exist anymore as a physical perimeter.” - Ken Rutsky, Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka As the world becomes increasingly digital, ensuring network connectivity and security become parallel objectives that all companies must prioritize. Add in trying to do it as efficiently as possible, and the challenge only grows. Ken Rutsky is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka. They...
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Down but Not Out: California’s Fight to Regulate Emissions
Art of Supply
There have been a number of efforts to regulate a transition to lower logistics-related emissions, and all of them involved the state of California and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). California always plays a unique role in these debates because they have the most air pollution in the country and also the toughest emissions regulations. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) predates the EPA. In the past, they have been able to make their own rules, only requiring waivers when newly proposed standards are tougher than Federal standards. On May 22, 2025, the Senate...
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A Procurement Crime at Intel: Loopholes and Lessons Learned
Art of Supply
While true crime has gained traction as a genre in the literary world, it's not often we see it applied to procurement. Yet, a fascinating and unsettling procurement fraud case has recently come to light within Intel Israel's operations. Every criminal investigation seeks to uncover means, motive, and opportunity, and this case checks all three boxes, with implications that go far beyond one company. Just a few weeks ago, a story broke that uncovered an alleged scheme in which a now-former employee, Natalia Avtsin, and a component supplier, Yefim Tsibolevsky from Energy Electronics 2000,...
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Prioritizing Dispute Prevention Over Problem Solving
Art of Supply
After spending years reviewing business books, Kelly Barner knows how to recognize authors who truly move the needle–and Kate Vitasek is one of them. Her latest work, Preventing the Dispute Before It Begins: Proven Mechanisms for Fostering Better Business Relationships, co-authored with James Groton, Ellen Waldman, and Allen Waxman, takes on a surprisingly neglected topic: dispute prevention. While this topic can be applied to procurement, it’s also very human, looking at business relationships from their most troubled moments and aspiring to lay out a plan as well as offering up resources...
info_outlineIn October of 2024, McDonald’s sued four of the world’s largest meat producers – Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef Packing – for allegedly conspiring to inflate the price of beef by creating artificial scarcity in the market.
This is not the first time McDonald’s has sued these meat producers, and it is not the first time these meat producers have been sued. Over 200 cases have been brought by restaurants, retailers, wholesalers, and ranchers. Some are still pending and others have been settled - with high payouts but no admission of wrongdoing.
In this week’s episode of Art of Supply, Kelly Barner reviews the case McDonald’s is making against the Big 4:
- The price setting power associated with controlling 80 percent of the U.S. beef market
- The complexity associated with trying to track cost and price data in a highly concentrated market
- Why being the largest beef buyer in the world isn’t enough to tip the scales in McDonald’s favor
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