A Good Game Deal

The market for game meat, once profitable, is now dysfunctional – and that was before the pandemic struck. What lies behind this collapse?

- Graham Downing

In days gone by, the economics of game shooting were neatly encapsulated in the apocryphal saying: “Up gets a fiver, bang goes sixpence, down comes half a crown.” Nowadays, the situation is rather different and more along the lines of: “Up gets £43 plus VAT, bang goes 30p, down comes… well, nothing.” Gamebirds, by which I mean shot pheasants and partridges as they are brought to hand on the shoot day, are virtually worthless in commercial terms. While the consumer may well be prepared to pay £3.95 for an oven-ready pheasant and even more for marinated fillets or a fancy game roulade, getting to those dizzy heights from a valueless raw product is a tricky business for today’s game dealing and processing industry.

“The game meat market is completely dysfunctional,” says Robert Gooch. “We deal with the by-product of a very successful commercial shooting industry and there’s absolutely no relationship between the supply of the by-product that comes to us and the demand for it.”

SELLING WHOLESALE

Twenty years ago, when Gooch got together with his business partner, master butcher Paul Denny, to form the Wild Meat Company, a Suffolk-based game dealing and processing business, they would go around the county’s farms and estates buying all the game they could, knowing that what they could not process and sell to their own customers they could trade on the wholesale market. That business model broke down some three years ago.