Update from the Pork Sector Council Chair (October 2026)

Following the recent sector council meeting, Glen Nimmo shares an update on the council’s priorities as well as thoughts on the Standard Pig Price and pre-slaughter stunning technology.

Your Pork Sector Council’s latest meeting marked something of a changing of the guard for its membership. For no fewer than four of our members, this was a final meeting before the end of their appointed terms.

If there was any sense that the meeting would be a gentle glide path to a post-AHDB life, then little could be further from the truth.

In the afternoon and evening prior to the meeting, AHDB facilitated a deep dive with the sector council into the factors that are likely to affect pig and pork production – as well as the broader food and agriculture sectors – over the next three to five years.

It was a horizon-scanning exercise, ensuring that current business plan priorities are squarely set against the opportunities and threats that face our levy payers.

Beyond the well-recognised challenges we see in day-to-day trading conditions, there is a recognition that we need to look at where medium-term value can be created for levy payers through future investment. Future challenges will be today’s problems soon enough.

There were many different strands of conversation over several hours. It is worth drawing out two in particular.

The British pork industry has done a fantastic job of aligning its values with the major retailers in this country – to the extent that in AHDB’s latest Porkwatch audit, 88% of fresh pork facings in the surveyed supermarkets had British origin and 82% of fresh sausage facings were also British.

More than half of ham and bacon facings were also British – a strong performance, but an opportunity for further penetration.

The meeting considered that this success is not replicated in foodservice.

Customer and consumer alignment on making sure out-of-home consumption of pork is predominantly British in origin is not as strong. Over time, this represents possibly the best opportunity to significantly raise the value and volume of British pork sold, by displacing imported product.

The meeting also discussed any role AHDB and its sector council could play in acting as a conduit between new technologies and our levy payers.

Across huge swathes of commercial and industrial life, technology is rapidly reshaping how we produce, process and administer.

Sector council members recognise that individual levy payers will find it very difficult to build the kind of knowledge databank that will allow them to quickly assimilate and analyse information to confidently invest in new technologies.

Therefore, is there value in collective action to consolidate and coordinate access to such information?

Both areas will be considered further as part of a medium-term strategy to ensure the levy is spent where it delivers the maximum return.

One of the most substantial topics of conversation ended up being particularly prescient. The sector council backed AHDB’s proposed efforts to facilitate a broad, multi-industry forum to investigate improvements in pre-slaughter stunning technologies.

Weaknesses in the use of carbon dioxide are broadly accepted, but the sector council is wholly sceptical that any of the currently proposed alternatives will deliver either animal welfare benefits or are capable of being deployed at the scale required to run a modern pork processing facility.

This forum will investigate novel solutions not yet considered.

This is timely and prescient because the UK Government has announced a consultation to investigate the phasing out of carbon dioxide stunning in the UK.

We would be the first major pig-producing nation globally to undertake such a move, and in the absence of any tried-and-tested alternative, it is a huge source of potential risk for our levy payers.

I have found over my two and a half years in this position of Chair of the Pork Sector Council that few topics have exercised a wide spectrum of levy payers’ minds like the Standard Pig Price (SPP) series.

Indeed, prompted by a levy payer query, one of the first things I did when I joined AHDB was to undertake a deep dive into the mechanics of how the price is calculated and the safeguards that are in place to make sure that it is accurate.

At the last meeting, the sector council considered whether a review of the SPP and its methodology was appropriate at this time.

My colleagues are fully appreciative of the dislocation between what the SPP is – a factual price-reporting series – and how it is used as part of the price-setting process in the day-to-day trading of many pigs.

Inevitably, that secondary use as a price discovery mechanism in commercial contracts intensifies the scrutiny over what does and does not go into the SPP.

Ultimately, the sector council unanimously agreed that, with a small adjustment, the SPP remains fit for purpose for the job it is designed to do, i.e. report the average price of clean pigs identified as ‘standard’ in the previous week.

Changes in commercial arrangements across the whole supply chain have reduced the number of pigs included in that sample, but not to the extent that it undermines its integrity as a benchmark price report.

Given the ongoing trend to produce larger pigs, the sector council recommended AHDB review whether weight bandings released as part of the data set could be adjusted to provide a more useful analysis of weights across the sample.

Beyond that, it was agreed to emphasise again through our levy payer communications what the SPP prices series contains, its purpose, how it is calculated and how users should interpret the data.

At the start of this note I discussed how this last sector council meeting felt like the end of an era with the number of departing members.

But this creates space for new members with new ideas, and we look forward to listening to these different perspectives over the coming cycle, ensuring what we do remains valuable and relevant for our levy payers.

Once the recruitment process completes, new members will be presented to levy payers to ratify their appointments in the late autumn. Please engage fully in that process.