The first summer holiday was a letdown for ground beef sales. They usually tick up on Memorial Day Weekend, but that didn’t happen this year.
Livestock economist, Derrell Peel says that is because demand for ground beef has already been stronger than usual.
According to Peel, “If you look over the last several months, really back to about this time last year, we saw beef markets at the wholesale level in particular across the board for all of the cuts, as well as ground beef. There’s lots of ways to make ground beef, obviously, but if you look at kind of a generalized ground beef price series, it moved sharply higher about a year ago and stayed high through the rest of the year and has stayed high so far this year, and that’s kind of the story. Again, we didn’t see that May increase seasonally, but we were already at a very strong level, and we’ve just really haven’t seen that ground beef market falter at all.”
Because of inflation, consumers might trade higher-end beef for lower-end items. Peel says that switch is often to ground beef.
He says that some other cuts that were high last year have adjusted significantly since the beginning of the year.
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