Hot Commodities: An Offaly Happy July 4th!

We wish you all had a happy Independence Day and hope you enjoyed the day off with exciting activities, whether you celebrated by heating assorted cow, chicken and pig parts over an open flame, attended a VIP tank parade, watched colorful sky explosions, or scared the daylights out of neighborhood dogs with your own bottle rocket war.

Hot Dogs

We at PanXchange relished the opportunity to ketchup about more serious commodities at a later date. For now let's talk about Hot Dogs. Americans devoured nearly 150 million hot dogs this Independence Day. If we were to line those hotdogs up, that is roughly enough hotdogs to span the longest section of the Pacific Ocean. Fourth of July hot dog metrics, compared to our peak hot dog season, are just a drop in the bucket of a whopping total of 7 billion hotdogs consumed between Memorial Day and Labor day. According to the National Hotdog and Sausage Council, American’s consume roughly 70 hot dogs per person every year. Consuming that many hotdogs could make your stomach feel the würst! Take your time, folks. 

Offal 

What about all the meat that didn’t make it to hot dogs? The fancy term for all the viscera — the internal organs including heart, lungs, kidney, brain — is offal. In some areas around the world, these innards are considered a delicacy and there is a large globally traded market.

The U.S. is the single largest exporter of offal at a total value of $1.82 billion as consumers here are usually afraid of meats not white, red, or heavily processed. Asian countries are the largest importers, with a broader diet. 

So those looking for a unique July 4th experience can try out this deep fried cow brain recipe. That sounds offaly tasty. 

Offal Exporters

Offal Importers

Source: MIT’s The Observatory of Economic Complexity

https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/hs92/0206/

Fireworks

All’s flare in love and war, and Trump’s trade war will be no exception. This time next year the United States could be seeing a huge uptick in the cost of fireworks if China’s leader, Xi JinPing does not continue talks with the United States. If prices for fireworks increase significantly we could be seeing a startling number of pyrotechnic companies declaring bankruptcy. Many of these companies operate on razor thin margins and the explosion of fireworks prices next year could mean the implosion of their businesses. It’s not skyrocket science, we all know fireworks can be dangerous. Between 7,300 and 8500 people on average end up with firework related injuries on the Fourth of July and this year will be no exception. Please stay safe out there and have a fantastic holiday!

Fake Meat Wars

For those of you wanting to jump on the meatless BBQ bandwagon, you’ll have an array of choices as the fake meat wars are heat up. Beyond Meat Inc BYND shares dropped recently after Whole Foods signed a deal with competitor Impossible to sell their meatless burgers at the store. But let’s not beet around the bush. Whole Foods doesn’t carrot all, they will do as they peas when attempting to increase revenue in the alternative protein market.

And there’s been a lot of recent focus on Kellogg’s K, who owns one of the original alternative-protein brands, Morningstar Farms. With Kellogg’s stalk underperforming the market, analysts have bean calling for a Morningstar, Inc. MORN spinoff into an IPO or similar offering. As a stand-alone entity, it could have some legume to run!

But one of the major beneficiaries of the increase in demand has been pea producers. Typically grown in rotation as a nitrogen fixer, prices shot up as demand from the alternative meat as well as general plant based diet increased. Farmers around the country have another crop in their arsenal to diversify from the other two majors, corn and soy.

But enough of farming talk, grab some meatless patties, fire up the grill, and turnip the beet - it’s time to party!

Blockchain

The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that the TradeLens blockchain initiative for seaborne cargo added two more shipping companies — Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd AG and Japan’s Ocean Network Express — bringing the program to five of the six largest carriers controlling around 60% of total global container capacity. The initiative, initially launched by IBM and A.P. Moller-Maersk, aims to improve tracking of shipments and reduce paperwork. 

Investors may want to hop on the TradeLens platform befoar they are too late. Could this be the first non-crypto blockchain project to achieve critical mast?

Blockchainia!

The multi-decade long Israeli-Palestinian conflict may have finally found a solution: Blockchain!  The Trump administration announced that they have tapped an Israeli crypto startup to develop blockchain solutions to solve the regional conflict! While no Palestinians were in any of the meetings between Israeli firms and the American government, and the Palestinians boycotted the summit where the blockchain announcement was made, the Israeli delegates assured that “team is working with Palestinians ‘on both the design of these projects and the implementation on the ground.’” Is there anything blockchain can’t do?

Image Sourced by Pixabay