Ground Beef Demand Starts Summer Strong

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

Well, officially summer kicks off next week. But unofficially, of course, Memorial Day weekend is the kickoff to summer – the kickoff to that grilling season – and typically the kickoff to ground beef demand. However, we did not see a big jump in that this year. But it’s for good reason. Dr. Derrell Peel is with Oklahoma State University. A livestock market economist, he says we didn’t see an uptick in demand because that is already stronger than usual right now…

“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 for 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 been 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.”

And, when you think big picture, this makes sense. People are still buying beef. But they are trading right now, because of inflation, some of the higher end products for products of lower value to get a better price. Again Dr. Derrell Peel with Oklahoma State University.