The Australian domestic food service industry is a large, diverse and growing target for the beef industry, recent scrutiny has shown.
Business researcher and forecaster BIS Shrapnel suggests there are currently around 75,000 commercial and institutional food service outlets across Australia, covering everything from fine dining restaurants to takeaways, pubs, clubs and institutional end-users like hospitals, military and mining camp canteens.
Institutional users are numerically strongest, accounting for about 20,000 users, but perhaps not surprisingly, fast food outlets, known within marketing circles as quick-service restaurants, are next numbering 16,300 sites.
Restaurants aren’t far behind, with 15,400 businesses across Australia, followed by cafes (12,100 in round terms), hotels/motels (4000) and caterers (3000). At the smaller end of the scale are pubs (2400), clubs (1500), function centres (1500) and sporting venues, with 1400 outlets nationwide.
BIS Foodservice in January conducted a telephone survey of food service operators on behalf of Meat & Livestock Australia, across NSW, Queensland and Victoria. While the study was designed for MLA use, and does not represent the entire foodservice sector, it provides some useful pointers to demand patterns and where opportunities might lie for further beef trade.
Most popular cuts
Somewhat surprisingly, despite its high per-kilo price, tenderloin remained the most popular cut in use in food service, representing 41pc of all beef sales.
The traditional steak cuts of cube roll, striploin and rump were next, occupying 38pc, 37pc and 32pc respectively. Mince was much further back, at 31pc, followed by T-bone (21pc), silverside/topside as the first of the whole muscle secondary cuts (19pc), shin meat (9pc) and brisket (8pc).
Value share
Not surprisingly, restaurants dominated in the value share of food service beef users, accounting for 40pc of all beef used in the sector. This was more than twice the next largest category user, clubs (19pc by value), although clubs, by nature of their sheer size, accounted for a much larger share when measured by volume.
The value share for the hotel/motel segment was 14pc, followed by pubs (10pc), cafes (surprisingly low at 9pc, despite their numerically large population), and functions/caterers (8pc).
Beef was the most popular meat protein used in food service outlets surveyed in the BIS/MLA report, accounting for 39pc of all meat turnover. Lamb was next at 34pc, followed by poultry, 17pc and pork, 10pc.
MLA says the domestic food service beef market, particularly the upper end, has been sluggish for much of the past five years, commencing with the tightening of household spending in 2007 (due to rises in other household costs) and the impact on consumer confidence of the Global Financial Crisis from the second half of 2008.