Bye, bye, bacon. Pork producers in bind as Chinese diets get healthier

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China's frozen dumpling makers are finding there's a quick route to winning new sales – increase the vegetable content, and cutting down on the meat.

This departure from traditional pork-rich dumplings is a hit with busy, young urbanites, trying to reduce the fat in diets often heavy on fast food.

"They like to try to eat more healthy products once a week or fortnight. It's a big trend for mainland China consumers, especially those aged 20 to 35," said Ellis Wang, Shanghai-based marketing manager at US food giant General Mills, which owns top dumpling brand Wanchai Ferry.

Dumplings filled with meat and vegetables. /VCG Photo

For pig farmers in China and abroad, it is a difficult trend to stomach. The producers and other market experts had expected the growth to continue until at least 2026.

Chinese hog farmers are on a building spree, constructing huge modern farms to capture a bigger share of the world's biggest pork market, while leading producers overseas have been changing the way they raise their pigs to meet Chinese standards for imports. Some have, for example, stopped using growth hormones banned in China.

China still consumes a lot more meat than any other country. People in China will eat about 74 million tonnes of pork, beef and poultry this year, around twice as much as the United States, according to US agriculture department estimates.

Spareribs with brown sauce. /VCG Photo

More than half of that is pork and for foreign producers it has been a big growth market, especially for Western-style packaged meats.

But pork demand has hit a ceiling, well ahead of most official forecasts. Sales of pork have now fallen for the past three years, according to data from research firm Euromonitor.

Last year they hit three-year lows of 40.85 million tonnes from 42.49 million tonnes in 2014, and Euromonitor predicts they will also fall slightly in 2017.

Chinese hog prices are down around 25 percent since January, even though official numbers suggest supply is lower compared with last year.

A supermarket in China. /VCG Photo

Since China began opening up to the outside world in the late 1970s, pork demand has expanded by an average 5.7 percent every year, until 2014 as the booming economy allowed hundreds of millions of people to afford to eat meat more often.

Now, growing concerns about obesity and heart health shape shopping habits too, fueling sales of everything from avocados to fruit juices and sportswear.

"Market demand remains very weak. I think one factor behind this is people believe less meat is healthier. This is a new trend," said Pan Chenjun, executive director of food and agriculture research at Rabobank in Hong Kong.

(Source: Reuters)