Panic over avian flu led many to buy frozen or to choose a different meat altogether this Christmas – leaving poultry suppliers overstocked
Source - Daily Telegraph - 20/12/22
As we come to the end of a year of shortages which, at one time or another, saw our shelves bare of everything from cooking oil to mustard and eggs, it seemed inevitable, perhaps, that we would see out 2022 unable to track down a turkey.
A few months ago, as we began to hear about rafters of turkeys blighted by avian flu and warnings of Christmas shortages, many of us began to make alternative plans. For some, that meant forgoing the traditional 6kg bird altogether and planning the Christmas meal around a rib of beef, a large chicken or slab of pork shoulder. For others, it was a case of clearing a drawer in the freezer early for one of the thousands of turkeys that were being slaughtered and sold frozen well ahead of the big day.
We are now just four days away from Christmas lunch and, far from facing bare shelves or a black market for prize birds, supermarkets and high-end turkey farms appear to be teeming with supplies. In fact, there’s a price war on.
Last week, Tesco announced it would be selling fresh British turkeys (indoor whites, not free-range) to Clubcard customers at £4 per kilo. On Monday, Aldi beat it by a penny, cutting its cheapest fresh birds to £3.99 per kilo, with signs in its stores promoting their unbeatable price tags.
Lidl is also selling fresh turkeys for £3.99 per kilo. Tesco cites its commitment to helping customers through the cost of living crisis as the reason for the low prices. But while that will undoubtedly be good news for anyone in search of a cheap turkey for the 25th, the apparent glut of cut-price birds is a kick in the teeth for free-range suppliers and independent vendors whose businesses were affected by the news this could be a turkey-free Christmas.
Butchers buying in fewer turkeys will have hoped to retain business by encouraging people to switch to a different meat – and a last-ditch price slash in the supermarkets may now leave them without those sales either.
For suppliers like Tom Copas, of Copas Turkeys, a high-end farm near Maidenhead, it’s a tough end to a year that has been “challenging from the off”. He says: “First of all, we were worried about labour, then we had the Ukraine war kick off and the effect on our feed price and farm costs. Then we got the labour, and then we had the bird flu.”
Panic around bird flu has, he says, driven the market down. “What we’re hearing back from our butchers is that their demand is dramatically down.” Fears of shortages meant orders for turkeys simply didn’t come in at the same rate this year. Meanwhile, he points out, sales for frozen turkeys shot up by 200 per cent.
Some farmers took advantage of Defra’s announcement in October that they were altering legislation to allow farmers to start slaughtering birds early and freeze them. They could then be defrosted in time for Christmas sales or sold as frozen.
“So I think people have bought a frozen turkey early, on the basis they all might be frozen anyway,” says Copas. “And then a lot of the press as well has been around alternatives [such as] beef and pork.”
How we got from famine to feast seems to be a classic tale of panic breeding panic. It began when stories of an outbreak of bird flu began to build. Last month, the British Poultry Council told the House of Commons’ Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee that of the nine million turkeys produced each year for the festive season in Britain, around 1.6 million had already died of avian flu or been culled.
Richard Griffiths, chief executive of the British Poultry Council, said free-range producers had been hit “very, very hard”, and consumers would face a “big, big” shortage of birds at Christmas. The price of crowning your festive table with a fresh turkey would, so reports suggested, be expensive too – as much as 45 per cent more than usual, thanks to the shortages. Choice would also be limited, with the number of whole and crown options falling by a third compared with last year, according to industry magazine The Grocer.
But take a stroll down the poultry aisle in the supermarkets this week, or give your local turkey farmer a call, and you may find you can buy a bird at either end of the quality scale without too much trouble. Many suppliers at the lower end of the market managed to avoid the culling inflicted on higher quality free-range birds (which are more at risk of bird flu), leaving plenty of turkeys for Christmas. Meanwhile, higher end suppliers have, in many cases, been left with more than they anticipated, thanks to a drop in demand.
“We’ve had more turkeys than we planned to have so we’ve had to try to work out what we do with those,” says Copas. “We’re hearing from others in the sector that some people have a huge amount left over.
“It’s because the market hasn’t been there. Our sector mainly supplies high-end butchers and farm-gate sales. I’ve heard stories of farmers who managed to duck and weave and dodge bird flu and, lucky them, they made it. But because everyone’s been so aware of the bird flu situation they’re not actually ordering turkeys for Christmas, so [farmers] are struggling to sell them from the farm gate. People are being put off the idea and looking at other stuff.”
For Geoffrey Buchanan, director of Gressingham Foods, the history books will not look back on 2022 as a red letter year for British poultry, but nor is there quite the dearth of turkeys that were predicted. Overall, supply numbers might be down thanks to culling, but there is “enough to go round”.
“There are less of the premium-type turkeys, the free-range bronze. That type of production has been harder hit with bird flu. Whereas the traditional indoor white turkeys haven’t been as hard hit so there’s a more normal supply of those.”
Though the drop in price at the supermarket does at least “drive demand”, it also risks “devaluing the true cost of the product”, he adds. “There’s been a lot of inflation on farm costs, so I guess those costs aren’t being fully passed through to the consumer.”
He can see why a price war suits the supermarkets. “If they can offer competitively priced turkey then it might bring more footfall into their shop and then consumers will buy all the other bits they need for Christmas on the same visit and they’ll make their margin on the other products.”
What will happen, then, to any excess turkeys? Paul White, a farmer in Lancashire, says he has been left with “hundreds” of unsold turkeys due to what he refers to as “scaremongering” by supermarkets who peddled “the myth” of a turkey shortage in order to drive up sales of frozen birds. He has launched a campaign to help struggling families and get rid of his glut of birds, asking customers to buy £10 vouchers on his turkey farm – for every five vouchers sold, he’ll donate a turkey to a family in need of a helping hand with their Christmas lunch.
“We had an oversupply of turkey, because people have opted for frozen and we would have hated to think they’d go to waste,” he told his local newspaper. “We know lots of people are struggling this year, so it was a chance for us to do some good out of what has been a pretty tough situation for us.”
Tom Copas’s advice for those searching for a last-minute turkey? “Speak to your local farmer, because they’ve still got turkeys to sell for this Christmas.”
It could be time to rethink that rib of beef then – turkey may be back on the menu.
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