According to data analysts, Kantar, both chicken and pork were the winners over the Christmas period, covering 12 weeks to 25th December 2022, while turkey sales declined.
Fresh primary meat and poultry grew 9.7% over the last 12 weeks an improvement on last month’s 7% growth. Kantar said this was due to an improvement in volume performance, which now stands at 0.3%. Price also contributed to the improved performance of the sector, with price per kg growing by 9.8% compared to last year, which is slightly down on last month’s 10% growth.
Chicken continued to be a star performer over Christmas, growing by 11.9% over the last 12 weeks compared to last year. Volume is growing slightly at 2.3%, which is up from last month. Chicken is also still experiencing significant price growth with a kg of chicken now being 65p more expensive than last year. However, at £4.45 per kg chicken still represents good value for shoppers when compared to other proteins such as turkey and beef, which are priced at £8.78 and £8.93, respectively.
Consumers spent £2.7 million less on turkey joints and crowns, although that may well be attributed to the catastrophic, and ongoing avian flu crisis, which meant over 600,000 turkeys were culled.
Processed meat and poultry’s 9.8% growth puts it slightly ahead of primary meat and poultry. Within this area, sausages and fresh processed poultry were the strongest performers with growth of 9.8% and 10.2%, which is, again, a rise from last month.
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
