Last mentioned: 3d ago
BLS Report
Data shows average ground beef at $6.75/lb, up 13% from prior year; Midwest prices near $7.
Second All-Time High
Prices surge again during the approach to summer grilling season, breaking the previous record.
First All-Time High
Ground beef price reaches a new record peak early in the year.
Start of Herd Contraction
The U.S. cattle herd begins a multi-year decline, driven by drought and economic pressures.
The U.S. cattle herd’s seven-year contraction is slashing beef production, pushing ground beef to $6.75 per pound (up 13% YoY). Supply chain professionals face sustained procurement pressure, with drought, labor shortages, and seasonal demand driving costs higher and no quick recovery in sight.
This page surfaces every story mentioning Wal-Mart across our supply chain coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running supply chain beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where Wal-Mart was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |