Turkey, Duck & Goose

Take chicken out of poultry and what is left divides into two worlds that barely touch. World poultry meat runs about 140 million tonnes a year, of which broiler chicken is roughly 123 million tonnes, close to 88 percent of everything. The remainder is not one market but two. Duck and goose together come to about 12 million tonnes, and China alone accounts for something like 10 million of it. Turkey is 5 to 6 million tonnes, and it is a Western bird: the United States is the largest producer at around 2.4 million tonnes, followed by Brazil, Germany, Poland, and Italy, while China, which dominates every other bird, produces about 16,000 tonnes of it, which is a rounding error. So duck and goose together are about twice the size of turkey, almost entirely Chinese, and growing at roughly 4.9 percent a year, while turkey is Western and shrinking at about half a percent a year. Neither has a futures market anywhere on earth.

Turkey is also a strange shape for a commodity, because it is close to a one-week market. The bird is bought whole, and it is bought for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so an entire production system of hatcheries, barns, and cold stores is built around a demand spike that arrives on a fixed calendar date and then vanishes. That is why turkey has a cold-storage cycle unlike anything in chicken, and why a supply shock that would be absorbed quietly in a year-round market shows up as a headline price spike in November.

The decline is worth explaining, because it has four separate causes stacked on top of each other. The first is that the whole bird stopped fitting how people eat. A frozen turkey needs days to thaw, hours to cook, and a table large enough to justify it, and households have been getting smaller for fifty years; whole retail turkey consumption in the October-to-December quarter of 2023 was the lowest since 1980. The second is that turkey's growth in the 1980s and 1990s came from repositioning it as the lean health protein, sold as deli slices and ground turkey rather than as a bird, and that argument was then won by chicken, which is cheaper, more versatile, and sold in exactly the boneless portions modern cooking wants. The third is disease, and turkeys are hit disproportionately: highly pathogenic avian influenza has destroyed roughly 18.7 million US turkeys since 2022, about a tenth of all birds lost to the outbreak despite turkeys being a small fraction of the national flock, with avian metapneumovirus adding to the toll. The fourth is ordinary cost and consolidation, high feed and labour costs squeezing a low-margin business. Put together, US per-capita turkey consumption has fallen from a peak of 18.1 pounds in 1996 to about 13.9 pounds, and the flock from roughly 303 million birds in 1996 to about 195 million in 2025, down 36 percent and the smallest in around forty years. That shrinkage is why a bird in structural decline can still deliver a violent price rally, as it did in 2025.

The duck and goose story is the opposite in every respect. It is Chinese, it is year-round, and it is growing. China produces close to 80 percent of the world's duck meat, and the Pekin duck, the white breed behind roughly 90 percent of commercial ducks worldwide, originated there before being exported as breeding stock to everyone else. Roast duck is a restaurant staple with its own institutions, and unlike turkey the bird is eaten across the year rather than on two dates. Goose is smaller and even more concentrated in China, surviving in the West mainly as a German and Central European Christmas dish. The trade is beginning to have friction: the EU opened an anti-dumping investigation into Chinese duck imports in 2025, which is the kind of thing that happens to a market once it gets big enough to matter.

The part of this business a commodity trader would actually recognise is not the meat at all. It is down and feathers, a market worth roughly 7.8 billion dollars in 2023 and forecast to roughly double by the mid-2030s. Down is a byproduct: something like 99 percent of world feather production comes off birds already slaughtered for food, which means the down trade is structurally a downstream claim on Chinese duck dinners. China supplies about 80 percent of the world's down and around 90 percent of duck down specifically. It is graded like a commodity, on fill power, the loft a given weight of down achieves, and it splits by bird: duck down is about two thirds of the market on cost and availability, while goose down carries a premium because its clusters are larger and its fill power higher. Certification schemes, the Responsible Down Standard and the Global Traceable Down Standard, exist because of live-plucking, in which birds are stripped of down while alive, estimated at only 1 to 2 percent of world supply but concentrated in China, Hungary, and Poland. So a jacket or a duvet is, in supply-chain terms, a claim on the Chinese poultry industry.

Foie gras is the one part of this complex whose size is set by legislation rather than by price. It is the fattened liver of a force-fed duck or goose, France produces roughly 70 percent of the world total, with Hungary, Bulgaria, and Spain behind it, and production is now banned in more than two dozen countries. In the United States, California's SB 1520, passed in 2004 and in force since 2012, bans both the force-feeding and the sale of foie gras produced that way, and has survived every industry challenge. New York City passed a sales ban in 2019 intended to start in 2022; it has been upheld on appeal but is still tied up short of enforcement. It is a useful case for this book precisely because supply and demand are almost beside the point: the addressable market is whatever the statute book leaves standing.

None of these birds has a futures contract, and the reasons are the same ones that keep chicken off an exchange, only stronger. The product is perishable, it is not one standardised deliverable (a whole frozen hen turkey, a duck breast, and a bale of down are different goods), the turkey trade is violently seasonal, and duck and goose are overwhelmingly a domestic Chinese market rather than an internationally traded one. Pricing is therefore cash: USDA and private wholesale quotes for turkey in the West, domestic wholesale markets in China for duck and goose, and a separate specification-driven trade in down priced on fill power and origin. Where these producers hedge at all, they hedge the input, buying corn and soybean meal, exactly as the chicken integrators do.