Meat Talk

In the last episode of Meat Talk we talked about the alternative protein market and made some strong predictions for this coming year in this amazing industry. But if you only took one thing from that episode, I hope it is this. For years, a small number of manufacturers had the market to themselves, with...

While red meat, poultry and seafood remain king of the proteins, the alternative protein market is chipping away at it, with this including plant-based, insect-based, and lab-grown products. The only question is, will it be like the Grand Canyon and take 70 million years to develop fully, or suddenly burst fully onto the scene like...

In the latest Which magazine, beef is singled out as the most environmentally unfriendly protein out there, mostly due to cattle methane emissions. Regardless of being correct or not, what if you could actually not only contain this gas, but make a profit off it as well? Welcome to the world of Daniel Larn, maker...

A recent cover of The New Yorker shows a crowded sidewalk during morning rush hour. However, it’s not people looking at their i-Phones or drinking coffee, but robots on their way to work. The only human is a panhandler at their feet, being tossed nuts and bolts. When many think of automation or robotics, this...

If 2020 has shown us one thing, it’s this: For many, the longest established ways of getting our meat onto consumers’ plates is not working. Mark Smith at Double Up Social Media says that in a recent survey, over half of marketers agreed that the Covid pandemic has caused radical or significant changes to their...

The government ads have been impossible to miss on TV. “If you have a business and you haven’t taken the steps to prepare for Brexit, time is running out!” Unfortunately, the government has not taken its own advice, in particular when it comes to our meat industry. As it stands today, it is just as...

Meat Talk discussions as of late have been focusing on craft butchers and the high quality meat that they source.  In this episode we are literally bringing the podcast to Worstead Estate farm in the north-east corner of East Anglia where we’ll be talking about wagyu beef. We have all heard about wagyu and for...

Once upon a time in the UK, a butcher shop was freezing steaks, sticking them in an large envelop and mailing them by post to customers, hoping that the steaks would arrive in an edible condition. Those days are long past and if Covid-19 has done one thing positive, it’s pushing you craft farmers and...

It would be really easy to focus in on the negative right now, on the worse of times, but that is not why you listen to Meat Talk. For this latest series of podcasts, we will be focusing on the positives, on companies that are not only surviving, but are also succeeding. On ones that...

If meat and poultry processing plants weren’t already hazardous places to work in, COVID-19 has brought the danger level to a new high. As of June, 30,000 meat processing plant workers have been stricken with the virus and over 100 have died, with the majority of these cases in the USA, UK and the rest...

Four years ago the world-wide meat snack industry was booming – be it described it in dollars, pounds or Korean won. Small craft jerky companies – specialising in imagination, quality and flavour – were spearheading this movement. But a lot can happen in four-years. In the States, big snack companies have bought out the small...

When we decided to cover the history of the red meat industry, we thought it would be just one episode. We were wrong. After we started looking at the past 100 years of the red meat processing industry, where we are today and where we’re headed as an industry started to make sense. This episode...

It’s odd knowing you lived through a Golden Age but I have, the golden age of the meat industry worker. As far as Golden Ages go, this one was actually pretty good as long as you weren’t a cow. It definitely beat the golden age of crossbows and plagues. While it seems unbelievable now, but...

If you visit a modern meat, poultry, or even fish processing plant, you might be surprised at how similar they are – no matter where you are in the world. But what surprise you even more that all our modern plants can be traced back to two Chicago meat packing rivals, who created the system...

A few years ago everyone was singing the praises the blockchain, how the secure electronic ledger was going to change forever food safety. With the ability to track a single chicken from farm to supermarket shelf, massive food recalls – costing millions and millions of dollars – would become a thing of the past. Forget...

In livestock production from pigs to chickens to salmon, consistency drives the market. If Ralph’s Supermarket wants chicken thighs at a specific weight, that’s what farmers produce for Ralph’s. In almost all the world’s leading proteins – chicken, pork, and salmon – there has been major breeding programs over the last 50 years for consistency...

Besides the usual things one can count on in life – taxes and death – we might add a third one, more food recalls due to plastic and rubber contamination in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. This is costing the industry millions upon millions. In the last four years, plastic and rubber recalls...

Throughout the western world one thing you can bank on is that there will be fewer butchers and shops than the year before. But now, a new generation of butchers from Brooklyn to London to Belgium are fighting back against domineering supermarket chains and challenging this trend. What this means is giving people something big...

It started back in 2007 when some hungry, scavenging pigs ate infected pork meat in the Black Sea Republic of Georgia. While the pigs might have died quickly, figuring out what killed them took much longer and that’s where all the problems began. By the time someone reached the ah-ha stage and said: “Hey, that...

You open-up a jar of instant coffee, break the lid seal with a spoon and you’re greeted with the smell of fresh coffee. Why, because the big companies like Nestles, Kraft, and others realize that the first few seconds that you spend with their product can be the most important ones. However, you open-up a...