The value of New Zealand's meat exports is close to £100 million per annum. Any business organisation selling a product on such a scale would ensure that it possessed very full up-to-date details as to the main factors affecting the sales of its product. However, New Zealand meat is not sold through one large business organisation but through a variety of local and overseas firms and this variety of selling channels perhaps accounts for our state of almost complete ignorance as to the quantitative significance of the various factors affecting the consumption of our meat in the main markets to which we send it. The Research Unit's programme of market research aims to provide some of this information and the present bulletin is the result of the first stage in our programme of work in this field.