Beef burgers and sausages came first at people’s barbecuing preferences last summer, with each taking a 27% share of barbecue occasions, according to figures provided by Kantar Worldpanel.
Last year’s barbecue occasions marked, however, a dramatic decrease in chicken consumption, which saw a decline of 6.3 million occasions, or 21.1%, compared with the previous year.
Kantar Worldpanel analyst Sam Sear attributes the lower figure to the fact that family occasions for that year grew to a 50% of barbecue occasions, as opposed to 2% of adult-only occasions.
Elsewhere, beef appeared in 9.7% of barbecues, while lamb came penultimate with 4.9%.
Last year’s barbecue occasions peaked later than usual, in August, in contrast to the earlier peaks in the two years before that, as the summer of 2016 saw an increase in the mean temperature, prompting the MET to dub it an ‘Indian Summer’.
The barbecue season appears to have benefited from the temperature increase, accruing a total of 115 million individual barbecue occasions, an increase of nine million on the year before.
Sear attributes the growth to an increase in weekday occasions at 64.9% on the back of weekend occasions, which dropped to 50.3% from 51.5% in 2015.
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.
