Chinese Appetites Continue Craving U.S. Beef

U.S. Meat Export Federation’s Senior Vice President for the Asian Pacific, Joel Haggard, says Chinese consumers continue to grow their appetite for U.S. Beef. Covid-zero policies have impacted demand in China, Haggard says, because people cannot travel and must stay at home.

“It restricts their mobility. I would say the largest impact has been on restaurants, in these lockdowns, restaurants are often told to shut down, and that takes out that food service component from demand. Now, a lot of that has been made up from retail purchases. You see record beef imports this year into China, so overall demand has been resilient, but we’d love to have everything open.”

Because of the lockdowns, Haggard says food service has gotten creative.

“In terms of eCommerce and delivery, China is one of the most advanced in the world. They got fantastic tech there, they built out the supply chains for E-commerce out beyond the top-tier cities into the fifth-tier cities, so we now have a much larger supply chain network for our products to make it out to even the smaller fourth and fifth tier towns.”

While these lockdowns have hindered the ability of the United States to sell as many pounds of beef as they would like to China, Haggard said there is still a lot of demand out there.