Beef bears down on chicken

01-05-2007 | Richard Rennie

The poultry market has fallen foul of the hike in feed prices bought on by the Australian drought, with beef and pork coming out the winners in consumption stakes.

Latest figures released this month by the New Zealand Beef & Lamb Marketing Bureau reveal a massive 16% hike in per capita beef demand in the last 12 months, with chicken losing 7.2% in consumption. Pork has also increased 7.4%.

Beef now totals 33.83kg/head, nearly eclipsing chicken at 34.93kg/head. Chicken consumption reached its peak in the 2004-05 year at 37.6kg/head, and had enjoyed year on year hikes until now. Pork consumption totals 19.56kg/head, up from 18.2kg/head a year earlier.

“It is fair to say chicken is having a bit of a hard time at present, and we are making gains at its expense,” says New Zealand Beef & Lamb Marketing Bureau chief executive Rod Slater.

On average poultry, fish and meat prices as measured by Statistics New Zealand have increased by 5.5% to the year ended February, with poultry driving the bulk of that increase. The increase for February 2007 alone was 7.1% on the previous month.

The 16% gain in beef sales represents a lift of 4.6kg/head in consumption. This is still significantly distant from the historical highs of the 1950s and 1960s when consumption reached 45kg/ha.

Total red meat consumption for the year ended September 2006 was 47.2kg, up 9.8% and the largest consumption per capita since September 1998.

Slater said the result was even more encouraging given total spend across all meats had also increased 6%. The value of the beef category was now $734 million, one of the highest value spend categories in supermarkets today, he says.

Price increases that had hit the poultry category were not unexpected, given the low prices the category had enjoyed in past years, says Slater.

“The drop off has come about through the price increases, not through any concern about bird flu or anything like that.

“The way prices had been heading the industry would be the first to say its prices had been too cheap, helping those gains it has made. Go back 25 years and chicken was hardly eaten. It has gone from zero to 34kg/head in that time.”

Campaign continues

Slater says the Bureau’s on-going campaign using Olympic stars the Swindell twins and Sarah Ulmer is continuing, with the third phase of the campaign due to start in early April.

“The first campaign focused on the high nutrition message, the second has been on the variety of cuts and meats available, where the twins were waiting on Sarah. The third phase is with them in the kitchen cooking. This campaign aims to highlight how easy it is to cook red meat offering a number of meal solutions.”

He said the campaign, created in-house, had been “fantastically” successful, with the Olympians proving ideal ambassadors and “every man’s daughter” when it came to their cross-market appeal.

The message is being focused on what Slater terms the “primary household shopper”, predominately females aged 19-50, so the broad reach of the campaign has been effective across that diverse group.

“They tend to be the gate keepers to our product. We do still have a trend of teenage vegetarianism, but rather than try and dissuade that we treat it as a phase. Research shows most come out of it and introduce red meat back into their diet when they take on responsibilities, whether it is a spouse or family.”

Long-term patterns in consumption include greater experimentation with different cuts, and gains continue in value added cuts.

Restaurant competition

Ten restaurants nationwide received a platinum Beef and Lamb Award this year. To mark the 10th year of the competition they were the few among the hundreds of restaurants in the country that have won the award for 10 years running.

Slater says little was changing with the competition that he attributed to lifting the standard for restaurant red meat meal experiences.

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