The weird uncle of the animal protein family

Prime Future 229: the newsletter for innovators in livestock, meat, and dairy

“The turkey sandwich wars are heating up🔥” 

lol that’s not a real headline — turkey hasn’t even received an invitation to the chicken sandwich wars.

Nor has a single ground turkey burger chain or a turkey-centric TikTok food trend emerged. Ground turkey burgers aren't even given the respect of a token menu slot, from any of the mainstream chicken or burger chains.

Think about the depths of market un-penetration that turkey has in foodservice – even the (increasingly unpopular) Impossible Burger gets more fast food menu space than turkey.

That's the degree of 'yikes' that ought to make the industry sit down and have a healthy mid-life crisis. Buy a motorcycle, cut bangs, do something.

To their credit, the turkey industry has expanded their market boundaries beyond the calendar walls of Thanksgiving and Christmas. What used to be primarily a whole bird market is now an industry geared towards further processing for value-added products in the deli case.

But the juice fueling those efforts has lost its squeeze. Per capita turkey consumption peaked in the 1990s, and today, the industry's CAGR is as dry as day three turkey leftovers — a salty .8%.

I originally set out to identify the one thing the turkey industry does better than all the other animal proteins. I regret to awkwardly inform you that I came out empty-handed.

Let’s face it: turkey is the weird uncle of the animal protein family that shows up at Thanksgiving because you can't not invite him, so everyone just hopes he won’t say anything too cringe.

As the deflating womp-womp-womp soundtrack plays in the background, let’s consider some takeaways we can draw from turkey's lack of market seasoning.