Let's Market Our Beef Story Well

There is a breed loyalty for discerning meat eaters…the value of the artificial beef is in the ability to feed masses.

In 2013 the big food news was the great reveal and test taste of a burger made of lab raised cultured beef. It looked like beef and tasted like beef yet there was a deluge of comment finding it ‘unnatural’.

The reasoning behind our preference for unadulterated food is quite patchy. Most of our diet has been cultivated and processed. Where is the cut-off point between natural and unnatural? When the psychologist Paul Rozin researched the prevalent preference for natural foods in 5 European countries and the US, the two essential qualities of natural were ‘no human processing’ and ‘no additives’.

Late last year I was at the Melbourne Royal Show with a team of young New Zealand cattle, fleece and sheep judges. I had the privilege of attending a forum where the future of beef was being discussed. Panellists included a person involved in the manufacture of ‘artificial’ meat, another from a company that provided a high end market service linking people directly through the internet with the farm source of their meat, and another who represented beef breeds. I asked him if, given both the focus on production and the development of artificial meat, there was a place for breeds any longer.


He argued there was. There was a breed loyalty for discerning meat eaters and also a premium market for the real thing. The guy talking about artificial meat agreed. He said that the value of the artificial beef was in the ability to feed masses. I have written before that to keep pace with population growth, ‘the world’s farmers will need to produce at least 60% more food than they currently do, if all the mouths are to be fed adequately.’


He in fact reinforced the view that the high end protein meat market would only grow.


More recently, attending an A&P Show in the South Island, I was invited to be a guest judge of their Paddock to Plate competition. The competition involves farmers entering a beef animal which is judged in the paddock then is processed and the carcass is judged ‘on the hook’. Finally a sample of meat is taken from the 6 finalists, for the winner to be determined by a taste test. I had received advice on how to do this from an expert and there were two other judges whose business it was to buy beef on the hoof that would translate into prime export product. There was a large number of farmers who had entered, and their families watching us.

I am relieved to say my marking correlated pretty well with that of the judges. And there was a delicious distinction between each of the 6 steaks we sampled.

New Zealand is a small country and certainly very good at boutique production which is in demand in premium markets which our beef producers have demonstrated. Farmers should explore opportunities to collaborate with other farmers and meat companies to create a coalition around new products, either through unique breeds, unique genetics, or regional relationships.

Let’s market our story well and learn from the failure of the wool industry. When synthetic fibres were introduced to the market we stopped telling our story of the attributes of this great natural fibre, and sheep farms turned into dairy farms.


This was first published in the Franklin County News, p5, April 10th 2018