A good game deal
In days gone by, the economics of game shooting were neatly encapsulated in the apocryphal saying: “Up gets a fiver, bang goes sixpence, down comes half a crown.” Nowadays, the situation is rather different and more along the lines of: “Up gets £43 plus VAT, bang goes 30p, down comes… well, nothing.” Gamebirds, by which I mean shot pheasants and partridges as they are brought to hand on the shoot day, are virtually worthless in commercial terms. While the consumer may well be prepared to pay £3.95 for an oven-ready pheasant and even more for marinated fillets or a fancy game roulade, getting to those dizzy heights from a valueless raw product is a tricky business for today’s game dealing and processing industry.
“The game meat market is completely dysfunctional,” says Robert Gooch. “We deal with the by-product of a very successful commercial shooting industry and there’s absolutely no relationship between the supply of the by-product that comes to us and the demand for it.”
SELLING WHOLESALE
Twenty years ago, when Gooch got together with his business partner,
