Trends in the Meat Case

October 19, 2010

1 Min Read
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ELMWOOD PARK, N.J.For the fourth time, Sealed Air's Cryovac Food Packaging Unit, The Beef Checkoff Program, and the National Pork Board teamed up for an audit of the nations meat cases. The findings from the 2010 National Meat Case Study were benchmarked against the same 2002, 2004 and 2007 studies in order to provide insight into emerging retail trends.

For the study, surveyors audited 124 retail supermarkets and nine club stores in 51 metro markets across 31 states on various days of the week at random times. Some of their key findings include:

  1. Store branding numbers changed the most of any audited categories in the study. The percent of packages with store branding in the meat case has tripled since 2004. 

  2. General consumer information on package grew. On-package nutrition labeling numbers and cooking information continued to increase. This years study also captured production claims, COOL labeling and the use of bilingual labels for the first time, giving further insight into the marketing activities taking place at the meat case.

  3. Packaging also changed. The amount of case ready packaging increased, while average package weight remained steady at 2 pounds.

  4. Products with a natural claim grew in 2010, up 10 percentage points from 2004.

  5. The zero stock analysis shines a spotlight on potential lost sales by documenting top selling cuts that were out of stock.

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