With those rising temperatures as summer is really kicking off, those grills are getting fired up right along with it. Now is the perfect time to enjoy a delicious burger right off the grill on a hot summer day, but what does that mean for our beef industry? Well, with more and more people grilling out, and those big summer holidays approaching, the demand for ground beef is really heating up.
The usual jump in ground beef demand through Memorial Day, our first major holiday in the summer season wasn?t seen. However, Oklahoma State University livestock market economist Dr. Derrell Peel, says it?s because the demand for ground beef is stronger than it usually is 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.?
Peel notes that typically, with the inflation, you would start to see consumers turn to the ground beef over other cuts of beef. Though, consumers are still buying beef, they might be trading some higher-end products for lower value products in order to get a better price.
?The ground beef market has continued strong, and I don’t think the strength that we see today is the result really of significant amounts of trading down at this point. I think that market has just been very strong, and it’s really got two sides to it. One of them is this time of the year with grilling season the retail part of the ground beef market is very strong, consumers taking a lot of burgers home to cook on the grill or on their weekend outings. While we also have of course the underlying food service demand, particularly the fast-food restaurants, and that has been very strong, again, for about the last year.?
Peel adds that from the beginning of the year until now, there has been a major adjustment down from some of the beef cuts that were high last year.
