Animal Protein Reports

Across the board in animal protein, producers have been dealing with input inflation. Pork
producers in particular have been struggling, as hog values languished through mid-year and
have not kept pace with costs.

In the years since COVID impacted consumers’ spending, the where, what and why of their decision-making process has been through a massive shift. For Americans, the product scarcity of the first and second quarters of 2020 proved paramount in what they put into their grocery carts. 

Chicken Wings and Breast Meat Set to Offer Reprieve for Inflation-Weary Consumers

After grappling with staff shortages, plant closures, and supply issues, the turkey industry has been hit by yet another problem in 2022: the worst Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) outbreak in U.S. history.

Seven years after the last outbreak, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza emerged again in 2022 in U.S. commercial poultry flocks. More than 40 million birds have been depopulated, disrupting supplies of eggs and turkey in particular.

Now that the universal federal free lunch program of the pandemic era has ended, more parents may be packing their kids’ back-to-school lunches — and facing sticker shock in the deli aisle.

In 2021 the market for proteins witnessed a new type of consumer, one who is less sensitive to higher retail meat prices and more interested in

U.S. egg producers have been hard-pressed in the past two years to align supplies with market demand. The flock typically expands ahead of demand for Easter and contracts during the summer months when interest wanes.

For more than a decade, free trade has become decidedly less popular in the U.S. Unfortunately for U.S. meat exporters, the rest of the world continues to make headway on trade agreements that threaten to put U.S. producers at a disadvantage in global markets.

The U.S. Dollar Index saw rapid deflation in 2020 and has coincided with a rally in commodity prices. 

2020 was the most volatile and, for many, the most challenging year in U.S. animal protein history.

Feed costs have been relatively benign since 2012, helping the beef, pork and poultry sectors to expand more from 2014 to 2019 than in any five year period in the industry’s history. But in the coming year, U.S. livestock and poultry producers will face more feed cost inflation than they have in over a decade, challenging their ability to recover after a difficult and volatile 2020.

The U.S. pork industry has built multiple new plants over the past four years, increasing U.S. packing capacity by 12% with much of this new capacity eyed for international markets. 

The spread of COVID-19 among people who work in many beef and pork plants across the country has led to plant slowdowns and shut downs, creating a bottleneck in the U.S. meat and livestock supply chain. 

In January, Walmart officially entered the beef business when it opened a case-ready beef plant in Thomasville, Georgia. 

Evolving U.S. demographics are shifting consumer preferences from white chicken meat to dark meat.

The US chicken industry has experienced an unprecedented run of historic profitability since 2012 and responded with a significant increase in production and processing capacity.

Last August when the first cases of African Swine Fever (ASF) were announced in Northeast China, it was immediately clear that the global pork sector would be affected.

U.S. animal protein supplies have reached all-time highs in both production and domestic consumption. 

African Swine Fever (ASF) is spreading throughout China, the world’s leading producer and consumer of pork. The swine disease — which is feared by every major pork producing and exporting country — has been detected in ten China provinces in the last two and a half months. 

Costco sells more than 90 million rotisserie chickens each year, so the announcement that plans to build a poultry processing complex in eastern Nebraska raised numerous questions about how the nation's third largest retailer will orchestrate the construction and operation of a $400 million poultry complex.

Beef production in the U.S. is on the rise, and export outlets have never been more important. U.S. beef exports in 2017 exceeded industry expectations and the momentum is expected to continue through 2018 with exports forecast to increase 4-6 percent. However, market access with key partners is creating a heightened level of uncertainty.