LIFE

Top-notch meat provider for Filipinos

Andrea Andres

Who is Mrs. Garcia?

For more than 25 years, she has provided quality meats and meat products to the local market.

Meatworld International Inc. brought the Philippines the name Mrs. Garcia in 1996 to represent a mom or "nanay" that provides Filipino families with "fresh meats and loving treats."

After years of being retail supplier in major supermarkets and convenience stores, on 11 October Mrs. Garcia opened its newest Community Store at Platinum Business Center, #188 Congressional Avenue, Quezon City.

Busy as a bee! Shoppers flock Mrs. Garcia's Meatshop on its grand opening day.

The shop serves variety of premium pork, beef, Korean and Japanese Cuts, including short ribs, sirloin, lean ground pork, liempo, and porkchop, as well as Japanese shabu-shabu, beef yakiniku, beef woo samgyeop, korean pork steak bulgogi, and pork samgyeopsal.

Mrs. Garcia is ready to supply for the holiday season.

The pandemic had severely affected the price market and, with the current inflation rate, it affects the performance of the firm for the past year.

"It's been a flat year for us — no growth but we're flat. It's the same performance as last year," Mrs. Garcia's Meats CEO Bernadette Lee said.

"Prices have gone up by about 20 percent. We had a situation in the Philippines, which was the African Swine Fever outbreak. The hog herd has been affected, which means most commercial farms have not been producing pork because the herd is sick. What the government has done is that it allowed us to import more, but with more imports, it has affected the cost of materials," she added.

The firm assured a steady supply of its products and hopes that there will be "revenge buying" from consumers.

"But everything is still a wait-and-see situation, especially now that foreign exchange has gone up. The working class has a limited budget," she said.

Amid the pandemic, Mrs. Garcia's Meat Shop established an online shop through its offical website and collaborating with e-commerce to continuously be accessible to its consumers.

"We do have our presence in a lot of online platforms. We've launched our stores in Shopee and Lazada. We have more projects in the pipeline, the end goal is to bring our meat products to our consumers wherever they are," business unit head Miguel Macaalay said.