The British are falling out of love with eating lamb, and sooner or later when the £ sterling gets stronger and exports fall off, it will have a knock on effect on producer lamb prices. In the last twelve months, according to figures published by the British Pig Executive (BPEX), people ate 8% less lamb than the year before, and whilst the pace of decline has slowed to a drop of 4% in the last twelve weeks, this contrasts with a growth of 4% for beef and 3% for pork. So whilst beef and pork are seeing consumers come back into the market there is no sign of the same for lamb.
So what is the problem?
Price is not helping of course. At £6.79 pence per kilo on average, lamb sells for about 80p a kilo more than beef and over £2 a kilo more than pork, and it would be easy to park it there and hope that somehow everything will come right again as consumers emerge from recessionary buying habits and start spending.
Apart from price, there is an issue of age. Lamb is bought primarily by the over 40’s, and Sam Pearl, chilled meat buyer from Tesco speaking to lamb producers in New Zealand, talked about the need to be innovative in the way lamb is presented to encourage younger buyers.
Certainly the supermarkets try to promote lamb. Sainsbury sells a range of lamb from different parts of the country. Tesco advertises in magazines. Booths, a small but very successful supermarket in the north and Sainsbury focus on breeds, Blackface in the case of Sainsbury and Herdwick in Booths.
Which leads us to the product itself and the biggest issue of all - lamb is a premium priced product but all too often it fails to deliver a premium eating experience. When shelling out £15 a kilo for chops or around £10 for a leg of lamb the product needs to be consistently superb otherwise people will be disappointed and refuse to buy again. Indeed, the BPEX data shows that less and less people are buying lamb.
Tracking down how best to improve lamb quality is not easy. Supermarkets send out mixed messages about lamb. Take seasonality. Except for a bit of Dorset lamb on their loose meat counter Waitrose holds fast to the principle of New Zealand in winter and UK sourced in summer. Tesco advertises that NZ is tenderest in spring, the south west and Wales in summer, and Northern England for Christmas, and Morrisons sticks to British all year round.
Then there’s age. EBLEX’s scientific work tells us that older, heavier lambs are tougher. Yet provided older carcasses are matured for at least 7 days, the lamb can be given the EBLEX quality mark. EBLEX also says that older ram lambs can develop off flavours. But over in NZ the Alliance farmers cooperative has done scientific work which concludes that this is not so.
Whilst there are some examples of growth in lamb sales, Tesco for example claiming that their sales have gone up by 12% because of promotions and encouraging new buyers, the main message is one of decline. So we must conclude that the issue with lamb goes deeper than an ageing consumer profile and a lack of excitement in its marketing.
One indisputable fact though is that consumers’ biggest complaint is about lamb is fattiness. Despite this, according to HCC, the Welsh meat executive, nearly 30% of lambs sold are fatter than R3L, and even after trimming by the processor, a lot of fat remains both around and within the meat. Could the time have come to tighten fat class standards further?
How irritated must consumers be, as I was, to buy two small chops for £5 yet find that nearly half is fat.
Whatever the answer, the total supply chain has to re-examine the issue of quality otherwise the market will move from niche to non existent.
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