Red Brand Canners (RBC)

1. Ignoring for the moment the chance to buy additional A-grade tomatoes. Formulate the production question as a linear programming problem, solve with BLP, or an equivalent software package, and answer the following questions.
   1. How much whole, juice, and paste shoule be made?
   2. What is the contribution?
   3. Are there any tomatoes left over? If so, of what grade?
   4. What is the average quality point count of whole, juice, and paste?
   5. What would be the worth of one additional pound of A-grade tomatoes?
   6. Should Red Brand Canners buy the extra 80,000 pounds of A-grade tomatoes at the offered price?
2. For the following questions, assume that the 80,000 pounds of A-grade is not in the formulation.
   1. What product mix would result if Cooper's contribution figures were used? Is Coopers contribution more or less than the contribution to your (earlier) Part 1 solution? Why the difference?
   2. Alternatively, what product mix would result if Myer's profit figures were used? What would the profit be? Is this more or less than you found in Part 1?
   3. The purchasing manager of a supermarket chain offered $3.60 per case for all the Whole Tomatoes that Red Brand Canners could produce at a minimum quality level of 7 points. Should the offer be accepted?
   4. Suppose an unlimited supply of A-grade tomatoes were available at $0.085 per lb. How much should RBC buy? What would be the product mix?