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A YEAR IN PERSPECTIVE

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BEST BUYS

BEST BUYS

A YEAR IN PERSPECTIVE

Big gains, some missed opportunities and an increase in affordability are the take homes from the game market this season, says the head of British Game Assurance Liam Stokes

THE build up to the 2022/23 season was one of anxiety and nervousness across the game meat sector the third such season we have experienced. A nexus of lead, bird flu and soaring costs combined to threaten a disastrous period of low supply and high prices. We now have the market data to unpick precisely what has happened over the past five months, and the upshot appears to be that it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it could have been, but that there is still significant room for improvement.

Perhaps the clearest signal, with the potential to cause the most enduring impact, was the difficulty in sourcing lead-free game experienced by many of the major retailers. It is increasingly looking like Christmas 2022 was a missed opportunity, as supermarkets report demand for lead-free birds outstripping supply throughout the crucial period from 30th November up until New Year̓s Eve.

Various factors resulted in the transition from lead slowing in the run-up to last season. The members of the National Game Dealers Association had announced back in 2021 that they would not accept a lead-shot bird on any of their premises from August 2022 onwards. By the time the 2022/23 season dawned, almost all had reversed the policy.

Some of that reversal was driven by demand; some by supply. As recorded in my last column, one of the stranger impacts of bird flu was the raging appetite for British game birds in Europe, to replace the decimated population of farmed ducks and geese. This market was happy to swallow lead-shot game. At the same time, the potential supply of leadfree birds slowly declined, as the ability to source non-lead ammunition proved more difficult than expected and shoots discovered their lead-shot game would be collected after all.

Empty shelves

It now seems that the slowing of the transition did indeed result in empty shelves, with insufficient lead-free birds available to meet the festive demand. Dealers are beginning to fret that unless the trend reverses and more shoots opt into lead-free ammo next season, supplying the major retailers is going to become even more challenging in 2023. Lost shelf space in supermarkets is not at all easy to win back, and whatever one might think of supermarkets, the reality is the volumes of game that they move are not easily placed elsewhere.

A further blow to Christmas takings was registered online, where profits took a hit as delivery services fell apart under the pressure of the Royal Mail strikes. From our own research, it seems that up to 40% of online food deliveries went awry, either arriving in poor condition or not arriving at all. I am sure almost every reader experienced some sort of postal delay during December. I was receiving Christmas cards in mid January.

These delays are devastating for online food retailers, who are called upon to issue refunds or resend orders, eating into profits at the time of year that is supposed to sustain the business through the leaner months. And of course, much like the empty supermarket shelves, the risk is that these customers opt for something other than game next season.

Of course, the impact of poor delivery services was not unique to game. The trouble is that the consumer doesn’t necessarily know that. Battling poor delivery services was one challenge game shared with the wider food world over the winter; raging overheads was another. Processing costs led to game increasing in price wherever it was found, both on menus and shop shelves. Yet perhaps surprisingly, the price increase we recorded in the game market outperformed the record levels of food inflation seen across the economy.

Food in the shops was up 13.3% on the previous Christmas. BGA has been working with Kantar for a couple of years now to generate the first food-industry standard data on game meat, and that data suggests that in the same time frame game experienced a much more muted 4.55% increase.

In hospitality, food inflation had reached a staggering 24% at the end of December 2022, with the added costs of catering staff and powering a restaurant layered on top of the stratospheric cost of food and materials. Figures for game in hospitality are a little harder to calculate, but from conversations with the outlets we work with, we estimate that game prices rose by 10-15% on restaurant menus across the country.

Some of the increase in the price being charged for game can be attributed to price indexing, in which a product’s price is matched to the value of something else, which would explain the additional inflation seen in the cost of game in hospitality. So, for example, game is seen as a more premium option than chicken, so a restaurant might stick a couple of quid on the price of a game-based meal to keep it that little bit more expensive than a chicken-based meal.

Cost crisis

Indexing is not the whole story, however. Game is undoubtedly costing more to the retailers, because game processing has been subject to the same cost crisis as the rest of the food sector. On average, dealers are seeing electricity costs go up 315% year on year, fuel up 40%, wage bills up 12.5%, packaging costs up 45-50%, among many other soaring expenses. The fact the cost of game increased at a slower rate than food in general reflects a reticence to pass these costs on to the consumer—a decision that is of benefit to all of us who want to see game lose its elitist connotations.

Within these various market signals there are certain clues as to what should be the way forward for the game meat market. We need improved marketing and coordination to diversify and ensure that we don’t see empty shelves again, and we need strides towards a larger lead-free meat supply. We need to drive down the causes of inefficiency in the supply chain, such as poor game meat handling and refrigeration, which drive up overheads. Small amounts of money, in certain locations, started changing hands for shot game last season. If we can crack these inefficiencies and diversify the market, there’s no reason why we can’t continue to drive value for game back through the supply chain, whilst growing the availability and affordability of game to the British public. GTN GTN

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