Jason Strong addressing 400 delegates at the Australian Wagyu Association conference on the Gold Coast this morning.

MACRO drivers for Australian beef demand remain “incredibly positive”, Meat & Livestock Australia managing director Jason Strong told this morning’s session of the Australian Wagyu Association annual conference on the Gold Coast.

The conference is one of the first big cattle industry gatherings in eastern Australia in over a year following the commencement of COVID lockdowns across Australia in March 2020.

Indeed the impacts of COVID on the premium export markets targeted by Australia’s red meat sector, and in particular its Wagyu industry, were a central feature of discussions in this morning’s opening session.

Before COVID the luxury segment of the global food service sector was growing three times faster than the broader food service industry.

A large amount of that growth was led by US and China.

Globally, just about every area of the food service sector was heavily impacted by COVID-19, especially fine dining.

“Globally if you were in anything but pizzas you suffered some damage,” Mr Strong said.

However, despite being the hardest hit, the fine dining segment is recovering, and is expected to recover to pre-COVID levels sometime between 2022 and 2023 – and possibly sooner depending on how quickly and successfully vaccination roll outs and systems to keep people safe from the virus play out.

However, even despite the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, impacts on global meat exports have not been as heavy as initially feared.

Australian Council Choice CEO Anthony Lee noted in his presentation that COVID caused a shift in buying channels with consumers swapping eating out and supermarkets to buying online.

“The rise in online sales was occurring prior to COVID, but during the pandemic we saw a big uplift which I believe is here to stay,” Mr Lee said.

Mr Strong noted that while Australia sent a lot less beef to China last year, exports still totalled 190,000 tonnes – its second biggest year on record.

Consumer red meat priorities had also shifted with safety, freshness and price becoming stronger priorities, which matched Australia’s beef quality attributes.

The primary message was that underlying demand for Australian beef remained very strong, he said.

MLA’s ongoing global consumer tracking research continues to show that Australian beef has earned strong affinity with consumers in many global markets, and is very much the preferred beef of choice, and a product that wealthier consumers are more willing to pay a premium for.

At the same time the beef category in most key markets is ‘premiumising’, which is a particularly rapid trend in emerging Asian markets.

While it may be easy to get distracted by headlines suggesting beef consumption is on the decline, the facts told a very different story, he said.

The broader community is still incredibly committed to red meat. It was also important to note that the source of many messages suggesting otherwise were companies selling alternative products trying to take beef’s place.

Globally beef-heavy cuisines are also gaining in popularity, he said.

While a small number of beef exporters and suppliers in Australia have been very heavily impacted by Chinese decisions to delist access for several Australian beef export processing plants, he said that globally the Australian beef industry is seeing “increasing demand like we’ve never seen before”.

The continuing impacts of African Swine Fever were part of that story, having left a massive hole in global meat protein supply, 40 times the size of Australia’s global beef exports last year.

Australia has established a very privileged position in the world beef market, and “we didn’t end up here by mistake,” Mr Strong said.

“This is what our industry has been working on for a long period of time – investing in a high quality, traceability, consistent product that is targeted at high end consumers globally.”

Mr Strong said MLA’s Global Consumer Tracking surveys have underlined the value of work the Wagyu industry has achieved in a short time to build its breed profile in recent years.

When asked which breed produces the highest quality of beef, Wagyu was the highest ranking among all breeds among consumers surveyed, and placed second to Angus in terms of breed awareness.