August was a very strong month for the meat department, especially on the fresh meat side. The five August weeks generated $10.1 billion, which was up 4.6 percent over August 2023, with pound gains of 1.4 percent, according to the August 2024 Performance Report from Circana, 210 Analytics, and Hillphoenix.
In the 52-week view, dollars now trend 3.2 percent ahead of last year. This increase reflects a combination of mild price increases and pound gains of one percent. Pound growth is driven by strong everyday and holiday demand for meat and poultry as the world has turned home-centric once more.
Three out of the five August weeks experienced volume growth in comparison to year-ago levels. The three middle August weeks are free of the impact of any national or major holidays, showing the strength of everyday demand. All August weeks had about the same sales, at around $2 billion.
With August delivering another strong performance, the year-to-date meat department sales reached $69 billion, which reflects an increase of 4.2 percent. Year-to-date pound sales reached 15 billion, which is up 1.8 percent over the same period last year.
Fresh Meat Sales by Protein
The big two, beef and chicken, had strong pound and dollar sales, but smaller proteins, including turkey and lamb also experienced robust gains in pound sales. For beef, the rise in pounds, in combination with continued inflation, led to an increase of 9.5 percent in August dollar sales compared to August 2023. Lamb’s 15.9 percent increase in dollar sales year-on-year is the result of a substantial increase in pound sales (+27.1 percent) combined with deflation of 8.8 percent.
| August 2024 | Latest 52 weeks | |||||||||
| Type | $ sales | $ vs. YA | Lbs vs. YA | Type | $ sales | $ vs. YA | Lbs vs. YA | |||
| Total fresh meat | $7.0B | +6.9% | +2.6% | Total fresh meat | $71.1B | +5.1% | +1.8% | |||
| Fresh beef | $3.9B | +9.5% | +4.3% | Fresh beef | $38.7B | +8.1% | +2.0% | |||
| Fresh chicken | $1.9B | +4.1% | +2.8% | Fresh chicken | $19.1B | +1.9% | +2.8% | |||
| Fresh pork | $834M | +2.7% | -2.6% | Fresh pork | $8.3B | +1.7% | -1.3% | |||
| Fresh turkey | $231M | +5.9% | +7.2% | Fresh turkey | $3.3B | +2.8% | +1.5% | |||
| Fresh lamb | $84M | +15.9% | +27.1% | Fresh lamb | $876M | +3.0% | +14.3% | |||
| Fresh exotic | $19M | +4.6% | +6.2% | Fresh exotic | $226M | +12.0% | +7.0% | |||
| Veal | $3.8M | -4.1% | -6.5% | Veal | $44M | -9.5% | -9.0% | |||
