“Wings” is not a product

A whole wing has three sections joined end to end. Closest to the body is the drumette, the small drumstick-shaped piece with a single bone. In the middle is the mid-joint, also called the flat or the wingette, with two parallel bones. At the end is the tip, which has very little meat.

• Whole wing, three joint: all three sections, intact.
• Two joint wing: drumette plus flat, tip removed. This is what most markets mean by a wing for retail or food service.
• Drumette alone: the premium section, priced accordingly.
• Mid-joint flat alone: sold separately, strong demand in some markets and almost none in others.
• Tips: a by-product with its own narrow market, mostly for stock and processing.

A seller quoting “wings” without naming the configuration can be offering any of the first four, and the difference between the cheapest and the dearest is not a rounding error.

In turkey the male and female lines are raised to different weights and give different piece sizes. For a processor buying to a portion weight, they are not interchangeable, and a shipment of the wrong one is unusable rather than merely disappointing. Specify which line, and specify the piece weight range.

Legs, thighs, drumsticks, backs, necks, tails and paws all trade separately and each has a geography. A cut that is a by-product in one market is a staple in another, which is the whole reason the international trade in poultry parts exists: a bird is disassembled and each part sold where it is worth most.

Two commercial consequences. First, prices for different parts of the same bird move independently, so a basket quoted as a single average price hides which line is expensive. Second, availability is driven by what the rest of the world is buying, which is why a line can be unobtainable in a month when the whole bird is cheap.

• The cut named by anatomy, not by category.
• Tom or hen for turkey, and the piece weight range.
• The pack: carton weight, block frozen or individually quick frozen, net or gross.
• The Incoterm and the named port, per destination port if there is more than one.
• Quantity per line, per month, not as a single basket figure.
• The establishment number, because an inadmissible plant makes all of the above irrelevant.

We send every enquiry on this corridor in that form and ask for the price per line on the same basis. It takes one extra paragraph to write and it removes two weeks of correspondence.

On a mixed programme the mix is worth more than the negotiation. Shifting the proportion of the container towards the lines with the widest spread between the buying market and the selling market can be worth more per month than every cent squeezed out of the supplier. That conversation belongs with the buyer at the start, not after the first shipment.