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...

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...

Over 25-years ago, an outbreak of E coli O157 in Jack in the Box restaurants in the States made people wake up to the fact that their hamburger could kill them. It would seem that the innocence, the fun, the love, American consumers had with burgers disappeared as newspapers became filled with stories about the...

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...

The USA’s largest export market for beef and pork is Japan, but perhaps never before has this market been hanging on tethers such as it is now. With a lack of trade deal, countries that do have one with Japan – including beef powerhouse Australia – are ready to bounce. However, one advantage the US...

In this episode Producer Rhian Owen looks into the boom in UK sausage sales and how it has spawn a trend for low meat sausages. Taking advantage of this trend is fraught with difficulties as the sausage enjoys a protected status under European law, but one enforcer’s rules can be very different from another’s. Rhian...

While it might seem hard to believe but once upon a time, the British people weren’t giving a thought to US chicken washed in chlorine, nor were there any US poultry producers even looking on a map to see where the UK was located. The UK poultry industry produced over 70 percent of chicken consumed...

An egg producer comes to your food safety agency about a slightly high level of a very regulated insecticide in his eggs. How it got there, he has no idea, but suspects a detergent he’s been using to control red mites. While it’s above the allowed safety level, it is not by much, so you...

While once saying the word ‘Klondike’ to a gold prospector brought about a sudden distant look off to the far horizon, today it’s a term used in the finance sector and in the commercial fishing industry to pretty much describe the exact same thing – the next big fishing grounds. In the meat/poultry industry, Meat...

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...

In this episode we’ll be talking about meat snacks, one of the most exciting sub-industries in the world’s meat/poultry whole-shebang. Why do we think this? Taken as a whole – meaning jerky, biltong, salami, salumi, Parma and Prosciutto ham, cured meat, Chinese lap chong, etc – the global meat snack industry is worth today around...

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...

It must have been 2004. I was at Brussel’s Seafood, the largest seafood show in the world, and was looking at a mussel company’s display. The mussels were sealed in black plastic boxes, each holding about a half pound of the shellfish. A guy at the stand came over. “How long do you think their...

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...

When Meat Talk visited Poland, things were getting a bit crazy weather-wise. Hotter than blazes, even the animals were feeling it with livestock going off feed and wolves attacking people. But, besides the weather, something else has been heating up in Poland, something for the last 10 years, and that’s its poultry industry, now rated...

In Part I of pet food we talked about how the globally industry will reach somewhere between $78 billion to $94 billion this year – don’t even ask about the value of baby food because it doesn’t even come close. In Part II we will talk about the nuts and bolts of the industry. The...

One of the fastest moving, biggest growth industries is not chicken, burgers, plant protein, or even anything for the Millennials. No, it’s food for our four-legged best friends. Whatever you think the global value of pet food is – you’re wrong, it’s a lot, lot more. In this episode of Meat Talk, we’ll be talking...

It’s a tale of two feet – chicken feet that is. Scorned by the West and loved in Asia, with the world’s poultry industry producing around 100 billion feet a year, do you fill up landfills with chicken feet or turn them into big profits? If only the answer was that easy. In ‘A love...

Back in 2006, an E. coli outbreak in the USA killed five people, made hundreds ill, and left scientists scratching their heads. They suspected strongly raw packaged spinach was the cause, but where was the source? By the time it was tracked down to a tiny, tiny Californian farm, all spinach in the USA –...

In 1963, the US nuclear attack submarine Thresher was lost at sea after an accident put her past her crush depth of 2,400 feet. In around 1/20 of a second, the boat imploded, releasing the same energy as 22,000 pounds of TNT. Now imagine a machine weighing a massive 120 tons and capable of producing...

Americans love their burgers, eating around 50 billion a year, which works out to an average of three a week for each person. While these billions include chicken, turkey, ostrich, kangaroo, bison, and even salmon, the clear majority are beef. But, thrown into this mix are some new offerings that look and taste pretty much...

As every visitor to India since Alexander the Great can tell you, it’s a country of contradictions. While it’s world’s largest Hindu nation, where cows have been revered and considered sacred for around 2,000 years, it has also recently become the world’s largest exporter of beef, with numbers well beyond that of Australia, Brazil and...

A recent court case decision in the US south against a pig producer is going to send shockwaves around the world. If you farm, produce, or process pork, beef, poultry, or even Pacific Northwest geoducks, you WILL to be affected by this. In a nutshell, a team of lawyers convinced people living around a pig...

Indonesia has been called many things over the years but let’s give you one more name of the massive archipelago – Indo-opportunities. The country has the world’s fourth largest population and in those millions, is also one of the world’s fastest growing middle-class societies. As it’s been shown 100% of the time; a rise in...

It’s hard to believe today, but once truck drivers were seen as knights of the road and the subject of feel-good songs and films. But as that image has faded, so too has their paychecks. Throughout the western world there is now such a shortage of qualified 18-wheel drivers that it is close to hitting...

While for us in the States and Europe there is a massive ‘yuck and disgust’ factor, for 2 billion people around the world, eating our six, eight, and more-legged friends is a way of life. In a new series in MPJ called Future Protein, we’ll be taking a look this year at which of these...

Once again voters in California will be going to the polls to decide how Midwest farmers are going to raise their livestock. This will leave USA’s big Ag gnashing its teeth at the Golden State, while giving the Humane Society US a reason to smile. Hard to believe, but it wasn’t always this way. In...

Editor Velo Mitrovich is fresh back from a visit to Greece. In this episode he is why all his hope for this industry is resting on the Millennials. The boomers are the most selfish generation every to live, and the millennials have been left holding the bag on banking, climate change, pollution and much more....

We continue our profile of Russia’s agricultural industry, looking at what you need to know if you want to do business in Russia, and what makes Russian’s tick. You need a lot of money to make it in Russia.

It might seem like an odd time to be talking about Russia. The USA and Russia are wiping the dust off their old Cold War launch codes, there is talk of more sanctions being placed on Russia, and even European countries are beginning to think the Bear could be interfering in their elections. So why...

Your craft meat company has everything going for it except for one thing – supermarkets won’t touch you because you can’t afford to offer them the same deal as the big players. Do you pack your bags and go home? Maybe this was the case last week but no longer; you now have access to...

Lamb is the world’s most popular red meat with fans in all countries except for one – the USA where a staggering 40 percent of the population has never even tasted lamb. And, to add insult to injury to US lamb producers, the lamb most commonly found in US supermarkets comes from Australia and New...

 Labor shortages put major pressure on processing plants across the globe, from the established markets of Europe and North America, to the developing markets of Nigeria and India. Velo Mitrovich examines the problems and ponders the future.

Scientific research is big business and getting the results published with headline grabbing spin has become part and parcle of ensuring future funding. But these sensationalized results are not only inaccurate but the are driving a knife into the meat industry. MPJ editor Velo Mitrovich sets out the challenge.

In a press release put out earlier this year from the San Francisco- headquartered Happy Egg Company it stated: “Everyone knows I have a soft spot for animals and want to see all animals treated with the best care,” said [new partner] Ross Mathews. “The Happy Egg Co. girls are like me – they enjoy...

Do you remember the best piece of chicken breast you’ve ever eaten? The best burger or even the best pork chop? Of course not, they just get lost in the protein haze of our recollections. But steak, now that’s a different story. Best steak, worse steak, thickest steak, juiciest steak – I can remember them...

Call it meat candy, food from gods, or the best thing mankind has ever invented; bacon continues to move into new territory in the USA – can the rest of the world be far behind? In this episode, MPJ editor Velo Mitrovich explores the world of bacon, finds out why and how bacon companies upped...