The overall Meat, Fish and Poultry (MFP) market is now seeing ‘static growth’ following a few months of decline, Kantar Worldpanel reveals.
With Christmas fast approaching, the latest data covering the 12 weeks to 7th October shows that there is growth in the overall grocery market but it is slowing down.
Nathan Ward, business unit director, MFP, said: “Chicken remains the strongest performer of the big four proteins, having been included in 1.9m more trips and bought by 73% of shoppers in the last 12 weeks.
“Chicken breasts and legs remain the strongest performers, with whole birds struggling - down 4% in volume terms.”
Chicken breasts have seen volume growth of almost 10%, and added an extra 2.5m trips over this period.
The versatility of the cut and falling prices - down 4%, or 25p per kilo – are encouraging shoppers to pick chicken breasts at the fixture.
Legs are also seeing fewer promotions, but shoppers make 830,000 more trips to the category.
Turkey has started to see strong growth, albeit from a small base – which suggests we could expect a strong run up to Christmas for the traditional proteins.
However, red meat is not performing as strongly. Ward explains: “Red meat has seen a strong decline in volume terms across beef, pork and most strongly, lamb. The latter has seen 2.3m fewer trips than this period last year, with only leg joints in growth.
“Volume sales of beef are down 4.6% as shoppers picked up 1.8m fewer kilos of roasting joints and 1.4m fewer kilos of mince.”
Ward added that, for roasts, there are fewer promotions - down 53% year on year - and losses are particularly pronounced among empty nesters and the retired, the key shopper groups for this category.
Mince is seeing a different trend, with more promotions on shelf and shoppers making less full price purchases, and is down by 9% overall.
The poor performance in beef roasts and mince has offset strong growth in steaks (up 6%) and marinades (up 26%).
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.
