CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. – The Canadian cattle industry has set an ambitious goal of increasing the value of domestic beef sales by more than 20 percent during the next five years.
Beef Information Centre marketing director Glenn Brand said that will mean an increase in domestic sales to one million tonnes by 2007, with a projected value of $7.9 billion in consumer spending.
It is realistic, Brand told the summer meeting of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, in light of the experience of the past five years.
Consumer spending on beef products increased almost $1 billion during the centre’s last five-year plan.
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“We met more than double our goal,” he said.
To reach the 2007 goal, the centre estimates that sales of beef products would have to increase to one million tonnes from 966,000 tonnes.
The strategy will be to continue to promote beef in the Canadian market and to increase the market value of each carcass by working with packers and retailers. By 2007, the population will have grown by more than one million, although many immigrants do not come from beef eating cultures.
The promotional centre expects to receive a budget increase when new check-off rules take effect in the new year. Last week, for the third consecutive year, Pfizer Animal Health Ltd. supplemented the centre’s budget with a $50,000 donation.
Brand said one of the issues confronting beef promoters is consumer reaction to well-publicized incidents of animal disease, illness caused by manure contamination of water and food-borne illnesses.
Research shows that ground beef is the product most suspected by consumers. He said surveys show as many as one-third of Canadians are not convinced that ground beef is safe.
Last year, when the water supply of Walkerton, Ont., was contaminated by E. coli from manure and seven people died, public faith in ground beef fell even lower.
“We saw that ground beef volumes fell off in the two week period following major media coverage of Walkerton. In the public mind, there was an association with ground beef, although there wasn’t,” Brand said in an interview. “Then, there were two major recalls that were knee-jerk reaction by Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Ground beef volumes fell off further.”
By mid-summer last year, more than 40 percent of Canadians suspected the safety of ground beef.
Yet by autumn, sales of ground beef had rebounded to pre-Walkerton levels, he said. Since then, despite news of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease, its share of the market has held.
“We had a short-term dip and then it came right back,” he said. “It is a very resilient product.”
Brand said that research in the United States this year has shown that stories of cattle illness made more consumers more negative to beef. It didn’t change their buying patterns, though.
“In the U.S., you saw a slight decline in attitudes toward beef products,” he said. “But the volumes shown by consumer purchase data didn’t decline. They stayed stable.”
This autumn, the centre is funding the most extensive study yet of Canadian consumer attitudes about beef products, in light of food safety worries.
“It will give us a lot to work with, but considering the strength of our market numbers, I don’t expect to find anything too startling.”
