Lamb sales in Sweden

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32678, 6 August 1971, Page 2

Lamb sales in Sweden

fN.Z P.A. staff Correspondent; LONDON, August 4

The Meat Board will be represented in Malmo, Sweden, next week to exhibit and promote New Zealand lamb in the city’s international trade fair.

The board has twice previously exhibited at Swedish trade fairs, but until 1968 a heavy tariff on imported

sheep meat kept sales in Sweden at a low level. In 1969, when the tariff

was cut in half, giving New Zealand a chance, the Swedes immediately reduced those chances again by creating a special tariff for Iceland lamb, as a gesture toward Iceland’s new membership of the European Free Trade Area. Nevertheless, New Zealand sold 144 tons of lamb to Sweden in 1969 and last year improved this to 169 tons, out of a total Swedish import of just over 500 tons, including the purchases from Iceland. The Meat Board will go ahead with next week’s promotion because it feels the time is ripe to persuade the Swedes that lamb is good to eat. “Our promotion will probably help Iceland as well as New Zealand,” a board official said, “but the Icelandic lamb is not generally of good quality—certainly it is well below the quality of New Zealand lamb—and we believe that any campaign to make lamb more palatable in Sweden will act mainly to our benefit. “What we would most like to do is to break into a supermarket chain, Some of the supermarkets in Sweden

are enormous, with 50 checkout desks, and if we could get an > order from one of those, we’d be made.”

The Meat Board display at the fair will include demonstrations of lamb cooking by chefs from several of Malmo’s top hotels and restaurants. There will also be a presentation of lamb to the Swedish Minister of Agriculture (Mr Bengtsson), and a competition in which visitors to the fair will be offered one of 103 prizes (most of them lamb dishes), if they can pick the lamb menu that will prove to be the most popular at the fair’s restaurant.