Cows still have their super-market power
The latest stats on dairy retail markets provided by the AHDB show that following a drop off in dairy consumption throughout the year, dairy has powered back upwards into the Christmas month of December.
This is good news for volumes and hopefully this trend continues.
Additional analysis by AHDB shows some great performance by dairy almost across the board.
The numbers showed some great positives but that butter slipped a fraction, and cream was down a trifle.
The big loser was plant dairy.
The detail in the report is well worth a read. This work by the AHDB gives us a valuable insight into how our products are trading.
Interesting to note that for Christmas, the trend was to trade up towards premium products.
Spend
The better news is the increase in spend. Rolling annual spend on cows milk was up a whapping 11.4% YOY as at the end of December '23.
The chart below shows that this spend has been increasing over the last year.
I guess the big question is, why is the farm gate milk price not rising quicker than it is?