Immigrants driving demand for world’s most consumed red meat—goat

The rapidly growing number of people seeking goat has restaurants and livestock producers struggling to keep up with demand.

The world’s most consumed red meat, according to the Alberta Goat Association, is goat, which is in high demand thanks to the influx of immigrants.

“Sixty per cent of the world’s red-meat consumption is goat,” said Mallory Kaiser, president of the Alberta Goat Association.

“New Canadians are coming into Canada and they can’t find that local goat meat, or they don’t know how to find that producer.”

The meat is popular in Central and South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

At Ahinke Kitchen, Nigerian co-owner Kunbi Olalere serves the meat in three dishes.

“Many demand to try the meat, but we don’t always have it available for our customers,” said Olalere.

Ahinke Kitchen opened in 2019, and since then the price of the meat has soared well over 30 per cent for Olalere.

“It’s expensive because it’s never available,” she said.

The need for the meat is felt on the farm as well.

Back in 2001, Maureen and Barry Lewis bought five goats to help cut the grass on their acreage.

“We soon realized there was great demand for them,” said Maureen Lewis.

By 2016, they had 120.

The couple now has significantly less after they chose to downsize their livestock.

“We worked to what we have now, which is a full, registered herd, and we sell the offspring for breeding stock,” said Lewis.

“No matter the size of the herd, no matter how many babies, we’ve never had to keep them.”

In 2024, nearly 100,000 goats were slaughtered, while in 2016 there were just over 86,600.

Producers have to accommodate a variety of different cultural needs.

“The big gap that we’re finding is that communication between so many different groups and so many have such a wide variation of what type of goat they’re looking for,” said Kaiser.

“Age and the sex and how they would like it processed compared to how they used to do it in their country of origin.”

Goat farmers are also up against producers from New Zealand and Australia.

In 2022, Canadian consumers purchased $20 million worth of goat from the two producers.

“But our cost of raising and the cost in Australia is way different, and so that’s where producers get into it,” said Kaiser.

“We’re trying to compete with such a low price coming in from Australia.”

Kaiser says the cheaper prices may lure immigrants to buy the shipped-in meat, but that doesn’t mean they will continue to eat it.

“A lot of the new Canadians, they look at our prices and they say, well, it’s too high. So they will go buy the cheaper stuff at Superstore or wherever, but then they don’t like the quality,” she said.

“Eventually they will try to buy the Canadian stuff, and then they will really like it.”

According to the Alberta Goat Association, there are more than 900 farms in the province raising goats.