Unless the debate about imported pork addresses the cost of living impact, change is likely to be slow.
It's surprising. NZ likes pork almost as much as beef. 88,000 tons was consumed here in 2023 (vs. 90,000 tons of beef). Of that, the country imported just over 52,000 tons and produced 36,000 domestically. According to Scale NZ’s recent research on sausages (which are not exclusively, but mostly pork), 83% of New Zealanders consume the category. Assuming those 88,000 tons of pork are consumed by the sausage-eating portion of NZ’s 5.12 million population, that comes to over 20kg of pork per person per year.
Pork is therefore a staple for many of us. Requiring equivalent animal welfare standards for imports would broadly impact household grocery spend, people’s sense of financial wellbeing (which is very fragile right now), and possibly their political choices.
What would that dollar impact be? This Spinoff article is worth reading, but doesn’t dig deeply into consumer impact. So here’s our stab at it.
Two companies are mentioned in the article. Hellers uses imported pork. And Freedom Farms NZ uses domestic. Hellers dominate the category, to an extent, because they use imported pork, giving them a price advantage. Our data shows that taken together, Hellers, Hellers Craft, and home brands Pams and Woolworths sausages (which we are taking to define the budget end of sausages) are eaten by nearly 70% of category users. If all pork sold in NZ had to be farmed at our standards of welfare or better, retail prices would rise. To estimate by how much, we can compare two brands of an equivalent product, one that uses local pork, the other imported.
Brand | Pork content | Pork Origin | Price per kg |
Hellers Craft Country Pork | 75% * | Overseas | $20.73 |
Freedom Farms Classic Pork Sausages | 75% | New Zealand | $28.87 |
* This 75% is according to Hellers’ website (https://hellers.co.nz/product/country-pork-sausages). Woolworths say the product is 85% meat (https://www.woolworths.co.nz/shop/productdetails?stockcode=74547) which is probably an honest mistake.
This looks like an $8.00/kg difference for the 70% of users who are buying budget sausages. For an average consumer, eating 20kg of pork a year (if it was all sausages, which it is not), that’s $160 more. In that ballpark, it’s hard to see welfare standards being applied to pork imports any time soon. That’s a pity because it would be of tremendous benefit for NZ farmers, not only those currently producing pork, but also potentially for farmers of other livestock whose export markets will come under increasing pressure in the next five years.
Or maybe we've got this all wrong. It's complicated.
Other factors would come into play, such as better scale economies for domestic producers, switching costs for other farmers, the extent of value-added processing and related product pricing, etc. That complexity underscores the need for interested parties like Animal Policy International and NZ Pork to collaboratively and carefully work out the costs and benefits, to NZ farmers and consumers, of requiring all imported pork to meet New Zealand’s high standards.
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