In Russia, pork and chicken meat have become almost the same price

Pork and chicken have almost equalized in price.

The wholesale price of both types of MEAT is almost identical, and this is not due to the rise in price of chicken, but to the fall in price of pork. What seems surprising to buyers is a natural process for industry professionals.

Pork and chicken have almost equalized in price. At the beginning of July, the wholesale price of pork half-carcasses was 172 rubles per kilogram, and the same weight of chicken carcasses costs 163 rubles. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, both types of meat are becoming cheaper. However, pork is losing its value more significantly. Since the beginning of the year, it has lost 5% of its value, while chicken has lost less than 2%.  According to Sergey Yushin, HEAD of the National Meat Association, the reason is a strong increase in pork production, while chicken remains stable:

- We associate the current price reduction primarily with a significant increase in production, with the fact that the supply of all types of meat is growing, and at a good pace, for example, agricultural organizations that produce live pigs for slaughter increase production every month by about 8% compared to last year, with the same period. Despite the fact that our consumption is also growing due primarily to an increase in disposable income of the population, at some points supply significantly exceeds demand. That is the stage we are at now, but again, this does not mean that prices can go down indefinitely, because there is also a limit to profitability, the dynamics of poultry production, which includes broilers , the dynamics are different there. Even at the beginning of the year, we were initially in the minus. Today, we have reached a very small plus, that is, the supply of poultry meat is actually not growing. Consequently, this, of course, determines a lower decrease in prices forpoultry meat .

— A moment about the convergence of prices for pork and chicken. Does this somehow affect the recipe for sausage products? In general, is there any influence or not?

— As for sausages that are produced according to technical specifications or standards of the organization, then, of course, there is greater flexibility. Technologists together with economists calculate how the recipe can be changed, preserving the taste and nutritional properties of the product, without worsening the quality and safety in general. It is possible to change this relationship between broiler poultry meat and pork — this is an absolutely normal practice. This allows us to level out price jumps for certain types of raw materials already in the final product, so this is a very good, flexible policy of our meat processing enterprises.

General DIRECTOR of the National Union of Pig Breeders Yuri Kovalev believes that the poultry market is more mature and therefore price fluctuations on it are rare:

"There is an annual growth of 5% to 10% in pork. And this year this growth is really continuing at about 6-7%. Moreover, the market is gradually becoming saturated. We have almost reached 100% self-sufficiency, domestic competition is sharply increasing, exports are also growing, but the growth rate is outpacing the growth rate of exports, so pork is getting cheaper. Poultry is a more mature market. It began to develop earlier, and, accordingly, the growth rate slowed down earlier. Pork is just entering the mature market, so the growth rate was very high even before this year. Starting next year, they will also decrease. Meat processing plants, if 10-15 years ago they switched from pork recipes to poultry, because poultry was cheaper, now the opposite process is observed, and all this causes an increased demand for pork. But the increase in production that, I say, he demonstrates, satisfies all this demand and even exceeds it, and therefore prices are stable. By the way, consumer prices for pork, we were talking about wholesale prices now, consumer prices have remained practically unchanged for almost six months."

Rosstat reported the day before that livestock and poultry production in agricultural organizations for January-May 2024 in live weight increased by approximately 4%.