Some supermarket prices make you glance and keep walking. Then there is the price of a leg of lamb. You pick it up, check the sticker, put it down, then pick it up again to make sure you read it correctly.
At $29.99 a kilo, a three-kilo leg is basically $90 before you add the potatoes, vegetables and everything else that turns it into Sunday dinner. Which feels slightly mad when you live in New Zealand, a country where sheep in paddocks are hardly a rare sight.
Surely if we grow the lamb here, it should be cheaper here?
Not necessarily, and this is the bit that catches a lot of us out. New Zealand exports around 95 percent of the sheepmeat we produce, so the lamb sitting in our supermarket is not part of some separate, cheaper local supply just for us.
It is worth what buyers around the world are prepared to pay for it too, and lately they have been prepared to pay quite a lot.
In the year to June 2026, New Zealand exported only one percent more sheepmeat than the year before, but the value of those exports jumped 26 percent to $5.2 billion. We did not suddenly ship mountains more lamb overseas. The lamb itself became more valuable.
That is good news if you are selling lamb. It is less exciting when you are trying to feed everyone on Sunday.
Then there is the thing that really gets people going: seeing New Zealand lamb advertised overseas for less than we appear to pay here.
A lamb does not go to market as one big product. It becomes legs, racks, loins, shoulders and other cuts, and different countries want different pieces. Some markets will also pay more for certain cuts than others.
Overseas supermarkets can make the comparison even more confusing. Around Christmas or Easter, some retailers sell lamb very cheaply because a good-value roast gets people through the door.
They may make next to nothing on that leg, knowing shoppers are probably also buying the potatoes, vegetables, dessert, wine and everything else for the meal. So that bargain New Zealand leg in Britain does not necessarily mean our lamb was sold cheaply overseas.
It may simply mean the supermarket decided lamb was the deal that would bring people in.
We also have another little extra on our bill: GST. Fresh food in New Zealand carries 15 percent GST, while raw meat in the UK is zero-rated for VAT.
That still does not explain every dollar on the price sticker, and it is fair to wonder exactly where the money goes. There is no wonderfully simple public breakdown showing how much of a leg of lamb is the animal itself, how much goes into processing and cutting, what is packaging and transport, and what is retail margin.
But the big reason is fairly simple.
We might grow lamb here, but we do not get a special New Zealand price for it. Our lamb is wanted around the world, and we are buying it in that same market.
Economically, that makes sense. Standing in the supermarket holding a nearly $90 leg of lamb, however, is when that lamb starts to look like chicken.
