Can High Prices and Health Scares Keep Americans From Their Deli Meat?

Sales dropped after the Boar’s Head recall, but as parents go back to packing school lunches, don’t bet against this popular staple.

It’s been a roller coaster of a month for lunch meat.

In late July, just as parents were starting to decide what to pack in school lunches, Boar’s Head recalled more than seven million pounds of ham, salami and other products after its liverwurst was linked to a deadly listeria outbreak. That’s enough cold cuts to fill 161 semi trucks.

Last Thursday, lunch meat became a political prop when it made a cameo appearance on a table of groceries laid out alongside Donald J. Trump as he delivered a speech complaining about the high cost of food. The price of lunch meat, his campaign said, had risen 23.2 percent since Kamala Harris became vice president. (Other national sales data have pegged the increase at about 25 percent.)

As if on cue, deli-meat sales dropped by almost 8 percent the week the recall was announced, which “in the grand scheme of things is very mild,” said Anne-Marie Roerink, president of the food research company 210 Analytics. Since they peaked during the pandemic era, lunch-meat sales as a whole have been soft. In the year ending in June, they dropped 2.4 percent.

But never bet against lunch meat. A staple that made its American debut at German-Jewish delis in the 1850s is now a $16 billion-a-year business that seems to navigate challenges and changes — whether warnings about links to cancer and heart disease, or sudden fads like the charcuterie board — with equal aplomb.

After a few years of pandemic- and price-related ups and downs, the cold-cut market is settling back into tempered growth, according to a 2023 report on bacon and lunch meat from Mintel. “Lunch meat has been an incredibly stable segment,” said Jonna Parker, a fresh-foods analyst with Circana. “There is a buoyancy.”