LONDON (Reuters) – Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket group, has no plans to source American beef despite last week’s U.S.-UK trade deal giving the product access to the UK market.
The deal gave U.S. farmers a quota of 13,000 metric tonnes for beef which meets UK standards, with UK farmers having the same quota for sales into the United States.
“We source 100% Irish and British beef in Tesco and for the foreseeable future that policy will be the same, we’re not planning to change it,” Tesco CEO Ken Murphy told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Retail Congress.
As market leader, Tesco has a 28% share of Britain’s grocery market.
No. 2 player Sainsbury’s, which has 15% of the market, similarly sources all of its beef from Britain and Ireland.
Last week, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins hailed American beef as “the safest, the best quality and the crown jewel of American agriculture” and predicted the trade deal would “exponentially increase” U.S. beef exports to Britain.
However, with little difference between prices of British-produced beef and U.S. beef that does meet UK standards, the U.S. product could struggle to find a UK market.
(Reporting by James Davey; Editing by Sachin Ravikumar)
