In 2020, overall meat dollar sales increased 18.4% and volume sales grew 10.3% versus the same period last year. This translates into an additional $12.7 billion in meat department sales during the pandemic, which includes an astounding additional $5.7 billion for beef, $1.6 billion for chicken and $1.1 billion for pork than during the same period in 2019.

November sales are dominated by the all important Thanksgiving holiday — one of the largest retail opportunities in meat and many other retail departments. This makes it a hard-to-beat sales occasion any year.

While restaurants certainly take some of the Thanksgiving food spend in typical years, the holiday is largely a retail-focused expenditure.

Eight months into the pandemic, COVID-19 remains in firm control of how and where people spend their food dollar.

Following its first single-digit gain since the onset of the pandemic last week, the meat department bounced back strongly.

The last full week of August saw the smallest increases since the start of the pandemic across virtually all departments.

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, claims-based meat availability was spotty at times, which affected purchase ability. However, antibiotic-related claims, organic and grass-fed claims saw unprecedented growth rates.

As pandemic shopping patterns started to unfold, many retailers had limited ability to create value-added items in-house, due to a lack of available labor hours. However, case-ready value-added items did very well.

Spending on meat in the club channel is still increasing, up 1.4 percentage points since the first pandemic measurement, the four weeks ending March 22. Traditional grocery, the largest channel, had a very high share during April, when shelter-in-place mandates were in place for the majority of states.

Five months into the pandemic, 57% of primary grocery shoppers were extremely concerned about COVID-19, according to wave 16 of the IRI sentiment survey. The concern is driving continued elevated spending in food retail, while also hampering the recovery of foodservice.

More than half, 56% of primary grocery shoppers, were extremely concerned about COVID-19 this week, according to the IRI survey of primary grocery shoppers.

Over the past two months, everyday demand had been experiencing week to week erosion as consumers started reengaging with foodservice.