CME Group, the world's leading derivatives marketplace, announced on June 30, 2026, plans to launch two types of Beef Trim contracts designed to help the agriculture industry manage price risk tied to the key ingredient in hamburger production. Beef trim — the meat and fat recovered during beef carcass processing — is the primary feedstock for ground beef and hamburgers, yet participants who trade it have lacked a standardized, exchange-cleared instrument to hedge their exposure.
What Beef Trim Is
Beef trim is a processing byproduct: after a carcass is broken into primary cuts, the remaining meat and fat is collected and sold to grinding operations, where it is blended into ground beef. Its price depends on conditions at multiple points in the cattle supply chain — slaughter volumes, relative demand for ground beef, and the balance of lean and fat coming off the fabrication floor — and it can move independently of broader cattle market signals.
For companies that buy or sell trim, that volatility is a real operating cost. Without a listed contract, managing it has meant either absorbing the exposure or negotiating bilateral agreements with counterparties, neither of which offers the transparency or counterparty clearing of an organized exchange.
Two Contracts Targeting the Processing Stage
CME Group said it intends to introduce two distinct types of Beef Trim contracts. The June 30 announcement described both broadly as tools for the agriculture industry to manage risk associated with producing hamburgers; it did not detail the specifications that distinguish the two contract types from one another.
The Chicago-based exchange, which already operates futures markets across the agricultural sector, would be extending its offerings into the processing and grinding stage of the cattle supply chain — the step closest to the finished ground beef product.
Who Would Use These Contracts
Any supply chain participant whose costs or revenues track beef trim prices has a potential use for these instruments: packing plants, grinding operations, food manufacturers, and restaurant and retail buyers among them. CME Group's planned contracts would give those parties a cleared, exchange-listed benchmark — a way to lock in prices and transfer risk that informal markets cannot fully replicate.
CME Group framed the Beef Trim contracts as a risk management solution for a key ingredient sitting at the center of the cattle supply chain.