N.B. Butcher Confident Steady Demand Will Persist
MEMRAMCOOK, N.B.–A southeast New Brunswick-based butcher shop is expecting steady demand for 2022, working in a time where the market can be difficult to predict.
Jocelyn Boudreau, operations manager of Boudreau Meat Market, said the business is coming off a seasonal spike in demand for turkey. But he expects demand to be steady in 2022.
Boudreau said the butcher shop, wholesale, and retail of beef, pork, lamb, turkey, and chicken has to find a balance in raising and buying the right amount of turkeys to meet unpredictable demand in a time of heightened health restrictions around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“When the Covid restrictions came along, that was challenging, because all of a sudden we had a really hard time predicting how much demand there’d be. Turkey isn’t something we can grow a week before, it’s something we plan months in advance,” said Boudreau.
“I need to place orders for them in January of that year, so it’s almost Russian roulette, trying to guess. That was our biggest challenge over the last four to five months.”
Demand has been steadily growing since 2020, said Boudreau. He noted that Christmas and Thanksgiving usually see demand for turkey spike. The price of birds, like all meat, increased in 2021 as well.
“Our turkey prices went up quite significantly, but so is everything we need to raise turkeys, like feed. That’s not just New Brunswick, that’s worldwide. There’s a shortage of everything,” he said.
Food inflation and supply chain issues caused meat prices in Canada to spike in 2020 and 2021. It’s a trend that Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab said would slow in 2022, in a recent report.
Demand Better In 2021
Boudreau told Huddle that 2021 was a better year for demand than 2020.
“It’s been constant (in 2021). It’s not a huge spike, but demand is growing,” he said.
There was an “unreal” spike in demand in the first four months of the pandemic that Bourdeau attributed to panic buying and freezer stocking. He said the rest of 2020 saw far less demand and lower sales.
To accommodate changing customer preferences, the company pivoted to home deliveries and saw increasing use of its e-commerce platform.
The Boudreau Meat Market promotes itself as selling custom cuts of market-price meat that’s slaughtered on site. But Boudreau notes it’s not necessarily in competition with the larger grocery chains.
The family-owned business wholesales its hormone- and antibiotic-free meat exclusively to grocers across New Brunswick, from Sussex to Miramichi, and gets its meat from five different farms across southeast New Brunswick. It also has been a vendor at the Marché de Dieppe Market for two decades.
“Everything we sell we grow ourselves, or is raised by local farmers in the region,” Boudreau said.
With the price of meat jumping since the start of the pandemic and pressures increasing, with farmers selling off much of their inventory because of the rising costs of raising animals, Boudreau said he’s focused on following market pricing.
“At the end of the day, we need labour, and we try to take care of the people we have working so they don’t leave, but so far, so good,” said Boudreau.
Higher market prices are accompanied by other expenses, like boxes, trays, and vacuum seal bags, which have all spiked as supply chains struggle to recover.
He stressed that the shop strives to keep abreast of weekly national pricing trends.
“We need to mind our margins to run the business but we’re not going to overcharge if we don’t have to.”
Sam Macdonald is a Huddle reporter in Moncton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].