Mince and sausages wiped off Butcher shelves amid coronavirus panic

One butcher has sold two-months worth of meat in less than four days, while another sold 1.2 tonnes in a day and has been forced to mince whole rumps with an unprecedented demand for mince meat amid panic buying.

Dan Wallace runs Your Everyday Gourmet butcher shop in Wangaratta and is struggling to keep up with demand for mince, suasages and chicken breast. Picture: ZOE PHILLIPS

MINCE has become the new toilet paper as the panic buying of goods amid the coronavirus threat hits the meat aisle.

One butcher has sold close to two-months worth of mince in less than four days, while another sold 1200kg of mince in one day yesterday.

Owner of Your Everyday Gourmet butchery in Wangaratta, Dan Wallace said they sold 1.2 tonnes (1200kg) of mince in one day yesterday and were having to mince whole rumps to keep up with demand.

And as a result prices had gone up $4/kg to $19.99/kg for mince.

“The only reason prices have gone up is because we can’t get lesser cuts (from suppliers) so we are having to mince premium product,” Mr Wallace said.

He said he noticed demand ramping up at the weekend, but in the past three days it had been “absolute bedlam”.

“Yesterday was our biggest day in 10 years... mince, chicken breast and beef sausages are the most in demand, and people are ringing us from all over the state.”

“All products are low across Victoria and Australia … We are trying our hardest to keep things affordable but it’s hard,” Mr Wallace said.

He said they had one butcher solely making sausages for 10 hours a day, and they were working 15 hour days to keep meat in the fridges in Wangaratta.

Speaking to his customers, Mr Wallace said a lot of people were stocking up because they didn’t know what was going to happen and were worried there’d be nothing left next week.

“It has gone off tap,” Doncaster butcher Brendan Watts said on Monday, describing the level of demand at his shop since late last week as unprecedented in his 50-year career.

Mr Watts said they sold close to two-months worth of mince in less than four days.

“It’s something I’ve not seen in my lifetime — the closest would be in 1972 when there was a strike at a major abattoir near Melbourne and people thought they wouldn’t be able to get any meat.”

Mince and sausages have become the most sought-after items, but retailers said any type of meat was flying off the shelves as people stockpile food for a potential lockdown.

And with the major supermarket chains now limiting mince to two packets per transaction and cabinets of meat being cleared out, consumers have rushed back to traditional butcher shops.

Ron Layfield, of Highland Meats, which operates shops at Daylesford and supplies retailers across Melbourne, said panic among consumers was so extreme there had been reports of people ringing and begging shops to stay open longer, or even open on Sunday.

“One butcher who had ordered four lamb (carcasses) for Saturday morning said he could have sold 18 or 20 — and that was just one little shop,” Mr Layfield said.

“We had people coming in buying five kilos of sausages. All the headlines about coronavirus are really making people panic and they all seem to want to get at least 14 days of food around them.”