Boneless, skinless breast meat may be on the decline as dark meat gains favor in the U.S.
Don’t be mistaken: Breast meat is still a highly sought after product. Analysts typically reference boneless, skinless (b/s) breast meat first as an indicator of the U.S. broiler industry’s overall financial health and as a proxy for domestic chicken demand more broadly.
Historically, breast meat’s bellwether status was secured by the often hefty premiums it carried over dark meat. However, more recent price behavior suggests dark meat is gaining on breast meat as consumer preferences and demographics change.
Measuring breast meat against dark meat
Comparing breast and dark meat prices can be a little misleading. The former is often referenced in boneless form while the latter typically in various bone-in forms such as whole legs, thighs or drumsticks.
Historically, b/s breast meat prices were at least twice – and often three to four times or even greater – more than bone-in dark meat cuts. This, however, isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison because all items are quoted on a per-pound basis. There’s a big discrepancy in comparing bone and edible matter content.
Narrowing price spreads
The emergence of b/s thigh meat helped create more accurate comparisons between white and dark meat as well as U.S. consumers’ relative tastes and preferences for each segment.
It’s significant that b/s thigh meat consistently averaged better than $1.15 per pound (USDA Northeast price) during the third quarter of 2018 while b/s breast meat slumped in the low part of the $1.00 to 90 cents per-pound range during the same time frame. Moreover, b/s thigh meat overall last year posted an annual average price higher than b/s breast meat for the first time ever.
It might be a little premature to say dark meat is knocking white meat completely off its perch, but it’s obvious the gap between the two is narrowing considerably.
The average price of boneless, skinless thigh meat was higher than the price of boneless, skinless breast meat for the first time ever in 2018.
A look into the future
It’s still not completely accurate to compare b/s thigh and breast meat on pricing alone given volume production of b/s breast meat is still roughly three times larger than b/s thigh meat output. The gap is closing, though, as b/s breast meat production is largely tracking with overall broiler production trends, while b/s thigh meat production more than doubled in the past few years.
It’s telling, then, that thigh meat is catching and passing breast meat even as production increased rapidly in recent years. As a result, chicken companies are expected to keep expanding production of boneless thigh meat to try and capture this added value.
Demographic trends in the U.S. with growing minority populations fond of dark meat also seem to favor this development. It may not be very far down the road when b/s thigh meat is viewed as at least equal, if not superior, to b/s breast meat as the go-to chicken product for U.S. consumers.
Read more:
Chicken wings and tenders prices in rare downturn, www.wattagnet.com/articles/35566
