As a young man, I hiked and camped in Vermont’s Green Mountains with a good friend. It was October, and so we were blanketed in arbors at the height of their autumnal color, not to mention tents and sleeping bags to protect us at night when the cold and wind came.

The most vivid memory I have is coming to a rock formation near a cliff, which offered a platform on which we could step out, sit and take in a breathtaking, expansive view. From our position, we could see Lake Champlain end to end, all 160 miles of it, as if it were a pond.

When I take a breath and a step back from covering the hectic, day-to-day impacts of COVID-19 on the meat industry, it is likewise an impressive view.

To be sure, there has been some cold and some wind — the elements of a consolidated industry vulnerable to supply shocks and a fragile labor force. But it’s biggest weakness also proved again to be its biggest strength: efficiency. Having seen major plants close and production plummet in the spring, they rebounded in staggering fashion, from as much as 40% down in some species to back to level — all within a matter of weeks.

All the while, smaller processors were filling in the gaps coast to coast, in a holiday-esque windfall of sales that Chris Young, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors, describes as “Christmas on steroids.” The pandemic impact, along with new efforts to facilitate small processors’ growth, only accelerated a boom in that sector that began a good decade ago with the emergence of the local food movement.

Through the peaks and valleys of the pandemic there has been a constant: consumers’ voracious appetite for the full spectrum of animal protein. The corollary products that mimic animal proteins have benefitted, as well.

From March 15 through Aug. 23, dollar sales at the grocery store meat department rose 31.7%, and volume sales increased 19.1% year on year. This, according to Anne Marie Roerink of 210 Analytics, amounts to an additional $8.6 billion in meat department sales, with an extra $4 billion for beef, $1.2 billion for chicken and $893 million for pork.

Notably, claims-based product — antibiotic-related, organic and grass-fed — saw unprecedented growth rates, gaining nearly 32% in dollars during the March through July pandemic period.

The pandemic was good to the meat alternative market, too. The numbers, again provided by Roerink, are big for refrigerated plant-based meat alternatives: Up 130.3% in dollars and $106 million in absolute dollars, and 104.4% in volume and 12.8 million in absolute pounds.

However, consider that in that same pandemic period, meat department dollar sales rose 31.7% with $8.6 billion in absolute dollar gains, and volume increased 19.1% with 1.5 billion in pound gains. As a percentage of the total combined sales of meat department and refrigerated meat alternatives, the latter’s share only stands at 0.6%.

From here, on this platform, the meat alternative market is a small pond. As with small meat processors, faux-meat manufacturers won’t soon outswim the larger fish whose size, scale and efficiency are unmatched.

But as we focus in on the growing global population and the protein requirements that the latter alone will not be able to meet, all are part of broad and dynamic landscape where each has its rightful — and profitable — place.

Editor's note: This blog ran as the Editorial in the October issue of Meatingplace magazine.

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