Impact of Increased Consumption of Ready to Eat Meals on the Scottish Supply Chains: Input-Output Analysis

Ready meals contribute to the economic performance of the UK economy. However, in 2020, demand declined due to the COVID-19 pandemic; chilled ready meals declined by 3.6 per cent but frozen and ambient ready meals grew by 10.1 per cent and 5.6 per cent, respectively. This has implications for the national economy. The purpose of this paper is to assess the implications of this increase/decrease on the entire Scottish economy. We rely on the latest Input-Output (IO) table (2017) from the Scottish government for our analysis. For this, the study disaggregates the original IO table sector ‘Other food products’ into ‘Other food products’ and the ‘Ready meals’ sector. We simulate the impacts of increase/decrease in demand for ready meals produced in Scotland on the entire Scottish economy. The changes were based on annual sales growth from 2017 to 2020. Results indicate that increased demand for ready meals produced in Scotland will expand all sectors of the economy, with the greatest impact on the ready meals (8.65 per cent) and other food products sectors (2.13 per cent). Changes in agricultural output were between 0.01 – 0.02 per cent.