Every wholesale price on a USDA report is FOB plant: the product priced at the packer's dock, freight not included. No buyer pays that number. The number a buyer actually pays is the landed cost, the all-in price of the product arrived at their own dock, and the gap between the two is where purchasing decisions are won and lost. Comparing two quotes FOB when the freight lanes differ, or comparing a domestic FOB price to a foreign one without duty and currency, is comparing two different products.
The components
Landed cost is the FOB price plus everything that happens between docks. Freight is the largest and most universal component: refrigerated truckload rates vary by lane, season, and fuel, and because meat moves on a roughly 40,000 pound truckload basis, a lane rate converts directly to cents per pound. The arithmetic is worth internalizing: every 400 dollars of freight on a full truckload is one cent per pound, so a 2,000 dollar lane adds five cents and a 6,000 dollar cross-continent lane adds fifteen. Product that ships in less than full loads pays proportionally more.
For cross-border product, three more components stack on. Clearance costs: customs brokerage, inspection fees, and the administrative cost of the crossing. Duty: determined by the trade status of the origin country and, where quotas exist, by whether the shipment enters within quota or over it, which can be the difference between free entry and a tariff that reprices the whole load. Currency: a price quoted in one currency and paid in another embeds the exchange rate on the day, and a multi-week gap between pricing and payment embeds exchange rate risk.
The Canadian case
A Canadian buyer importing US beef reads a USDA price in US dollars per hundredweight, FOB an American plant. Getting to a landed cost in Canadian dollars per kilogram means converting units, applying the exchange rate, adding the freight lane to their facility, and confirming duty status, where for beef the tariff rate quota system governs: within-quota volumes from eligible origins enter free, while over-quota product faces the most favoured nation rate. The quota question is not a footnote; when a pool fills late in a year, the same physical product can carry two very different landed costs depending on entry timing. The TRQ articles on this site cover that system in detail.
The order of operations matters less than the discipline of doing it every time. A US cut trading at an apparent discount to a domestic alternative can land more expensive once the lane and the exchange rate are applied, and the reverse is just as common.
The practical habit
The professional habit is simple: never compare prices across geographies in FOB terms. Convert everything to landed cost at your own dock, in your own currency and unit, before ranking options. That is the convention this site supports directly: prices can be viewed FOB in USDA terms or flipped to a landed basis with the buyer's own freight assumption applied, so the ranking a buyer sees matches the economics they will actually book.