The tongue is the most valuable thing on a steer's head, and almost none of it stays in the country. USDA prints three Swiss cut tongue lines every week, black, white and #2 mixed, and they all print within a few dollars of each other, around $650 a hundredweight this October. On the daily drop value report the tongue is worth more per steer than the hide. And the US Meat Export Federation has said more than nine in ten US beef tongues are exported, mostly to Japan and Mexico. A buyer here is bidding against Sendai for a part that weighs three and a half pounds.
This article covers the three cuts, what the colours and grades mean, what USDA prints, what the tongue is worth to the packer, and where it goes.
Long cut, short cut, Swiss cut
The three names are three trim levels of the same organ. Each one starts from the one before it.
Long cut is the whole organ with its root. The UNECE draft standard for edible co-products defines it as the entire tongue with the root, all the hyoid bones except the stylohyal, and the larynx, the epiglottis and the first three rings of the trachea still attached. The root is trimmed at the third tracheal ring.
Short cut drops the root. It is made from the long cut by separating the tongue from the root and the throat, directly behind the hyoid bones. The hyoid bones stay in, the tip of the epiglottis comes off, and about 10 percent trimming fat is left on the base. USDA's own spec, IMPS item 716, says the same in plainer words: the root smoothly removed immediately behind the base of the U-shaped hyoid bones, all of the windpipe gone, and the hyoid bones and epiglottis may be left on.
Swiss cut is the bare blade. It is the long cut with all of the hyoid bones, most of the fat, the muscular root and the base muscles removed, leaving only the body of the muscle, about 95 percent lean. IMPS item 717 reads the same: all bone, glands, muscular root and base muscles removed, the blade practically free of fat, unless the purchaser asks for the root left on. The Swiss cut is what USDA prices.
Tongue trimmings are the rest. The lean that comes off the root when a Swiss cut is made prints as its own USDA line, tongue trimmings, at about $50 a hundredweight against $666 for the tongue.
| Long cut | Short cut | Swiss cut | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Root | On | Off, cut behind the hyoid bones | Off, with the base muscles |
| Hyoid bones | In, except the stylohyal | In | Out |
| Larynx, epiglottis, trachea | On, three tracheal rings | Off, epiglottis tip off | Off |
| Fat | As agreed | About 10% on the base | Practically free |
| Spec | UNECE 6000 | UNECE 6010, IMPS 716 | UNECE 6030, IMPS 717 |
| USDA price line | None | None | Yes, three lines |
Black, white, mixed, #1 and #2
The colour is the skin of the blade. A white tongue has no black spots or other pigmentation anywhere on the blade. A black tongue is pigmented. Mixed is a box of both. The UNECE spec lists colour as something to be specified, white, black or spotted, and IMPS 717 lets a purchaser ask for white without patches of black. It is a look, not a trim: the muscle under the skin is the same.
USDA does not publish what makes a tongue #1 or #2. The weekly report carries #1 black, #1 white and #2 mixed, and the reportable items list and the report notes do not define the grades. Nothing public does.
And the print barely cares. Over the 130 weeks since September 2022 when USDA printed both the #1 black and the #1 white line, black was higher on 55 of them, white on 70, and the median gap was zero. Against the #2 mixed line, #1 black printed higher on 78 of 115 shared weeks, by a median of 1.4 percent. Colour and grade are a customer's preference, and in the US print they are worth almost nothing.
What USDA prints
USDA prints tongues once a week in the cow section of its beef variety meats report, frozen, FOB, in dollars per hundredweight, individually wrapped. Over the last twelve months to October 23, 2026:
| Line | Prints | Loads | Median | Last print |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tongues, #1 black Swiss cut, IW | 52 | 39 | $611/cwt | $665.57 on Oct 23, 2026, 1.1 loads |
| Tongues, #1 white Swiss cut, IW | 52 | 30 | $615/cwt | $660.00 on Oct 23, 2026, 0.3 loads |
| Tongues, #2 mixed Swiss cut, IW | 45 | 14 | $602/cwt | $655.00 on Oct 23, 2026, 0.3 loads |
| Tongue trimmings | 50 | 105 | $49/cwt | $50.35 on Oct 23, 2026 |
That is about 90 loads of Swiss cut tongue a year through the report, roughly 3.6 million pounds, on lines of a load or less most weeks. Five black prints between January and May 2026 carried the export tag, at $611 to $812, above the domestic line the same weeks. The steer tongue does not print in the weekly report at all; it shows up in the daily drop value report, at $738 a hundredweight on October 29, 2026.
The record. The #1 black line printed a median of $470 in the last four months of 2022, $533 in 2023, $585 in 2024, $572 in 2025 and $650 so far in 2026, with the high at $753 on May 22, 2026.
What a tongue is worth to the packer
USDA's daily drop value report figures the hide and offal value of a typical 1,400 pound steer. On October 29, 2026 it carried the tongue at 0.24 pounds per hundredweight of live animal, about 3.4 pounds a head, priced at $738 a hundredweight, worth $1.77 per live hundredweight. The branded hide was $1.71. The whole drop was $14.69, so the tongue was 12 percent of everything the packer gets for the animal outside the carcass, and the highest priced edible item on the sheet, above oxtails at $595, lips at $398 and cheek meat at $358. On the report's steer that is about $25 a head for one part.
Where tongues go
Export, almost entirely. More than 90 percent of US beef tongues are exported, primarily to customers in Northern Asia and Mexico, per the US Meat Export Federation. In 2025 tongue exports alone came to more than $15 for every head of fed cattle slaughtered, within a variety meat export total of more than $45 a head, per USMEF figures cited by the Beef Checkoff in August 2026.
Japan is the market. The US was the leading supplier of tongues to Japan with 42 percent of the market as of April 2025, ahead of Australia and Canada, and held 75 percent of the chilled tongue trade. US variety meat shipments to Japan are mainly tongues and skirts: 5,758 metric tons in the first two months of 2025, and more than 5,000 metric tons in December 2025 alone, worth $45.3 million, up 49 percent on the year.
The tariff was the fight. In September 2019 Japan's tariff on US beef tongue was 12.8 percent against 5.7 percent for countries inside the CPTPP trade pact, and Japanese buyers were waiting on a deal. The US-Japan Trade Agreement that took effect in 2020 gave US beef the same tariff treatment as the CPTPP members. When that door moves, the US tongue price moves with it, the way chicken paws move on China.