Cut-price roasts loom for this year’s Easter

Easter isn’t only for gorging on chocolate eggs, hot cross buns and the like. It’s also for roasting joints of meat alongside plenty of spuds.

Even so, the trend isn’t always a guaranteed bonanza for retailers. “We see an uplift in roasting occasions at Easter,” says AHDB retail insight manager Rebecca Gladman. But the extent is “reliant on whether or not we have an early or late bank holiday weekend, the weather and other external factors.”

That’s evinced by the sales declines seen in the fortnight before Easter 2022, when roasting joint volumes fell 19.2% year on year [Kantar]. This was driven in part by unflattering comparisons with 2021, when pubs and restaurants were shut due to Covid, meaning more people roasted at home.

Compared with 2021, beef joints fared worst in 2022, declining by 22%. Pork lost 21%, lamb 17% and chicken 16%. Compared with pre-pandemic sales, however, lamb was hardest hit, with volumes down by a quarter on 2019 volumes.

That’s troubling for lamb, which is especially linked to Easter, says Gladman. “Lamb sees greater share of roasting joint sales at Easter. In the two weeks before Easter 2022, 23% of sales were lamb when for the rest of the year it was around 6%,” she says, citing Kantar data.

Lamb’s problems are two-fold. Price was a barrier even before the economic crisis, and it’s since had one of the steepest rises. It’s also “heavily reliant on older consumers,” adds Gladman.

Her hope is lamb could be revived through a campaign akin to AHDB’s ‘Love Pork’, which “helped turn slow-cooked pulled pork into a hero product” about five years ago. She suggests modernising lamb shoulder to make it more relevant to shoppers.

For now, though, lamb hasn’t even made it into Aunt Bessie’s new range of frozen meat joints (see p57), comprising beef, gammon, pork, chicken and turkey.

They launched into Iceland this month as part of a bundle offer “that means a family of four can enjoy a full roast dinner for just £12 when purchasing one of the new meat joints and any three sides or desserts”, says Aunt Bessie’s marketing head Emily Frank. “Despite the cost of living challenges, many shoppers are placing renewed focus on show-stopping roasts that create a special moment around the dinner table.”