Beef Demand High, Inventory Low

Jim Matheson, executive director of the National Bison Association, says that consumer demand continues to grow, but bison inventory remains low, creating unique challenges and opportunities.

“Consumer demand is just growing like crazy for bison, it's really caught on. And this we've had these these shortages before. However, this time, we didn't have the pent up demand for it like we do this time. And on top of that, with cattle prices being so strong, typically, when we would hit high prices like this, we would see transition, of course, from cattlemen crossing over to bison, which we're not seeing so much this time because of those great cattle prices, and we're happy for those producers as well.”

Matheson says the rise in consumer demand for bison is tied to the national bison Association's marketing efforts promoting it as a uniquely American product with a strong nutrition profile and great taste.

“We've been doing a lot of consumer outreach. We've talked about the big bump we saw in consumer demand after COVID, when people started experimenting with bison a bit more, and since then, we really hit the consumer outreach piece pretty hard, doing a lot of in-person events. Once we could go back out in the world and do in person events, which continues through today. So we're doing a variety of food festivals, for example, for our in persons in other efforts there, as well as digital outreach.”

Creating more demand than there is supply.