Meat body urges groups to take a long-term view
In a week which saw proposals for a meat tax gain massive publicity, a leading trade body has called for levy-funded promotion campaigns to “look to the long term”.
The British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) yesterday said that this would reap more benefits than the current focus on short-term campaigns which although they might provide a quick salesboosting “sugar hit”, failed to address deeper issues.
“Shifting public perception is a long game,” said the BMPA’S chief executive, Nick Allen.
“We’re talking years. A one-off campaign of three or four months will result in a short-term sales uplift, but results are likely to tailoff quickly once the campaign finishes.”
He said that processors really wanted levy gathering organisations such as AHDB to look at the big picture, where a collective pooling of resources and a unified approach across the whole meat and livestock industry was required.
Stating that a more grassroots approach would be key, Allen said that the focus of levy-funded promotion should be on engaging with people and organisations who acted as influencers and channels into the public domain: “Working co-operatively with organisations like schools, health bodies, regulators and retailers to support their work with consumers so that the industry becomes a much bigger part of the conversation around meat.”
A spend of £1 million, claimed Allen, would go a long way to forming lasting relationships with such groups and give the industry as a whole a better chance of influencing the debate and shifting perceptions over the longer term. l Proposals for a tax on meat gained considerable TV chat-show airtime this week after a study lead by Oxford University calculated the level of tax which would be required to offset growing consumption of red and processed meats.
The study found that raw meat prices would need to increase by 14 per cent – but processed meats would need to almost double in price in order to seriously cut consumption.
And while the researchers claimed that any fall in the consumption of processed meat was likely to be offset by eating additional red meat, anti-meat groups jumped on the issue, claiming cutting overall consumption could save the health service billions.
However, one TV discussion raised a proposal that vegans should be the ones to be taxed – as their claims of longer life meant they would place a greater burden on a health service already under pressure from an ageing population.