The UK’s combined export sales of meat and dairy products surpassed £4bn ($5.39bn) in 2025, levy body AHDB says.

Citing HRMC data, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) said the country’s meat export sales rose 12% last year to £2bn.

The value of UK dairy exports jumped almost 17% to £2.2bn, the organisation said.

“The latest full-year figures for 2025 are a remarkable success story, underlining demand for our world-class dairy and red meat produce in a wide portfolio of markets,” Jonathan Eckley, AHDB's international trade development director, said.

In volume terms, the export picture for UK dairy producers was also positive. The country shipped 1.35 million tonnes of dairy products in 2025, up 9.1% on 12 months earlier.

The AHDB groups its dairy data into six categories: butter and other fats; cheese and curd; milk and cream; powdered and condensed milk; whey and whey products; and yogurt and buttermilk.

Export revenues from each category grew. Shipments of all categories bar yogurt and buttermilk rose year on year.

Milk and cream grew the most in tonnage terms, with exports picking up by 49,200t tonnes, or 6.2%, predominantly to Ireland, China, Spain and France. The value of those exports was £484m, up 17.2%.

The UK’s biggest export earner in dairy is cheese and curd. Sales stood at £971.2m in 2025, some 9.4% higher than in 2024 on a 4.4% increase in volumes to 205,774 tonnes.

Imports of dairy products into the UK grew 1.9% in volume terms to 1.27 million tonnes, driven by higher cheese, curd and yogurt shipments.

The surge of dairy imports from New Zealand in 2024 after the start of a free-trade deal with the UK in 2023 slowed last year but still increased by 3,500 tonnes, or 29.9%.

Just Food has asked AHDB to provide further data on meat volumes.