Restaurant roundtable - the future of beef

The UK is a key consumer of beef and a significant buyer of European beef. Beef imports account for 30% of total UK beef consumption, 95% of which comes from Europe, predominantly from Ireland. Meat from England and Scotland is still highly prized, but Irish meat, as well as that from the Basque country, is becoming increasingly popular in restaurants while Polish beef is growing in prominence in UK foodservice thanks to the value for money it offers.

The sector also faces a number of challenges, including a projected fall in the supply of beef cattle, rising prices which bring with them a need to make more money out of the carcase by championing less used cuts; and consumer misconceptions on the difference between grass fed and grain fed cattle.

With this in mind, Restaurant gathered a team of chefs, restaurateurs, butchers, suppliers, and trade experts to discuss the current beef landscape, the opportunities for EU beef in the UK, and what the future holds for the sector. Here’s what they had to say.

Getting more of out the carcase

Rupert Claxton: The movement of food around the world is a key part of controlling waste, effectively offsetting the price you would buy the cuts of meat that you buy into your restaurants. If you had to pay what the domestic market would pay, we would have to sell those rib eyes and rumps at a far higher price than we do.

Margaret Boanas: “We’ve printed cards for lamb, chicken, beef, and pork to try and explain that in the UK we eat six legs of lamb for every lamb and eight chicken breasts for every chicken. I’m trying to get the EU trade associations to do something similar to show how the carcasses move around Europe. The public don’t realise that very few people buy carcase anymore, they just buy the cut that they want.

James Lally: We only buy in whole carcase in our shop. We are constantly explaining to people that we don’t have any more flat iron steaks, for example, because there are only two bits either side of the cow and so are trying to educate people about other cuts. Trying to utilise other parts of the animal is a real struggle and a balance because customers only want certain things. When you start trying to find alternative cuts like Denver you’ve got to source them in some kind of volume, which is hard to do.

RC: The first time we really saw a change was in 2009/2010 when people realised that there was so much more they could extract from a carcase. We would be doing that again now, but we extract a lot of those bits already to offset the cost of the rest of the carcase, and we’ve got a labour problem where we can’t get people in the slaughterhouses to do it. Also, how much of that animal ends up in the grinder? You can do a lot about buying cuts such as feather blade but at the end of the day ground beef accounts for about 54% of the European market.

MB: You’ve got to make the fifth quarter [of the cow] sexy - there’s your challenge.

Grass-fed vs grain-fed

RC: Without any scientific evidence people have decided that grain-fed beef is a problem. Everybody has this image of an American feed lot where cattle are pumped full of something or other, but they are not. None of the products in the UK market does, even those which we import from the US.

JL: People come into the shop to say they have been advised by their doctors that they need to eat grass-fed meat.

MB: You just have to look in any children’s book and you see cows in a field eating grass. We have been brought up to believe that grass-fed is normal.

Richard Sanders: It’s misleading because for some grain-fed cattle for three quarters of its life it has been fed on grass. It should be called grain finished.

Fred Smith: It strikes me as being far too simplistic saying either grass-fed or grain-fed. People associate grain-fed with being mass produced in the US where actually there are farms in Scotland where they finish their cattle on local grains. How can we possibly consider those cows in the same way?

RC: Grass-fed beef is strongly championed but it should be about quality - and people often don’t talk about that enough.

Biggest concerns for 2025

Matt Owens: For me it’s supply and consistency. We need a consistent offer from one week to the next.

Ioannis Grammenos: It’s supply and price. The price we pay can vary every few months and that’s a big concern because you cannot pass it on to the consumer.

JL: Supply isn’t an issue for me, it’s more the rising costs that are associated with everything and which are pushing prices up. This puts us in a difficult position where we don’t really want to keep raising our prices but invariably have to.

RS: Trying to get good quality beef in the UK is getting more and more tricky. And it’s very hard to get good quality halal beef in the UK. That’s the biggest roadblock for us in foodservice.

FS: I’m constantly challenged by always having to buy 2.5% of an animal. Price is one challenge but also the element of security of price. I often have prices linked to an index and that index has been constantly ticking in a certain direction, which keeps triggering things and makes life more difficult for me. Security of supply is also an issue - knowing I’m going to be getting x supply each week is pretty powerful for me and not having a huge amount that’s reliant on the variability that you might find with some suppliers, whether that’s to do with kill numbers or the carcase size. Beyond 2025 I look at falling meat production forecasts and rising populations.

Future trends

RC: Are restaurants slicing steaks thinner and thinner to get the price point down?

IG: No. We increase prices but we don’t cut down on size because people are coming to treat themselves and want a good-sized steak.

RS: There has been a rise in sharing cuts in restaurants. Everyone wants T-bone steaks or 1.5kg tomahawks. Also, it looks better for a photo for social media.

FS: There’s that element of spectacle with a sharing steak. It’s about offering the customer something that they can’t do at home and that’s become more and more important these days in terms of going out. That theatre element is crucial for restaurants.

RC: Is there a demand for cheaper cuts?

IG: In my restaurant I put cheap cuts on the menu and people didn’t want them because they thought ‘I’m going out to eat a steak, I want a good one’. They can afford a ribeye or a sirloin rather than something a bit cheaper.

JL: Rib eye is definitely a buzz word among customers these days.

IG: Women tend to eat more rib eye in our restaurant, and men tend to go for fillet.

RC: If you went back to 2007 any pub would have had three steaks on the menu and you wouldn’t have seen a ribeye, but you would have seen sirloin, fillet and rump. By 2013 they had disappeared and been replaced by burgers and brioche buns, but they have crept back onto the menu. However, few restaurants now unless they are specialists offer a range of steak cuts - they often just have one steak on the menu.

FS: We’ve always had the approach of process over people, we try to make it so if we’ve got somebody with the right attitude, we can take them through our processes. This has made us less reliant on the skilled chef, which has become harder to find over the years. It’s proven to be a very valuable thing to do as it’s becoming even more challenging to find staff as time has gone on.

Understanding ageing

RC: The things that are done post slaughter, how long the meat has been aged for and using what process, do customers understand what that means?

JL: When people come into the shop, they don’t totally understand the full process of ageing. They are used to certain restaurants that will age for an excessive amount of time, which almost ruins it because you’ve broken the complex flavour of the meat and turned it into something that all tastes the same. There is definitely a consumer who doesn’t understand the difference between dry-aged and wet-aged, I have to explain that supermarket meat is wet-aged.

MB: I think it’s worse than that. Consumers today don’t even understand where food comes from.

RS: The term wet-aged sounds terrible, so we described it as being matured and vacuum packed.

Beef in foodservice

RC: Polish is the number two importer of beef into the UK [after Ireland], but it is much stronger in foodservice and manufacturing because of its price. The Polish are pushing quite hard in exports here and I think we’ll see better product coming though the Polish supply chain in the future.

RS: I think Polish beef is amazing.

RC: UK foodservice is definitely looking for alternative sources, it’s not tied to UK origin in the same way that retailers are, they have a much freer hand. I know some restaurants will say where their meat comes from and some butcher’s shops will tell me, but if I go to my standard pub and order a steak it won’t

JL: I know big catering butchers that are very good, and they have strong connections with Ireland and will bring in Hereford Irish beef, but they don’t sell it as Irish beef they sell it as Hereford beef. That then passes down to the restaurants.

RS: When it comes to foodservice, the KPIs of purchasing managers is finding sustainable products. It’s become a huge thing.

Grading

RC: Australia has an MSA standard for grading beef which people in Europe think is too complicated. The US and Canada also have systems that explain very clearly how it will perform to the consumer in terms of eating quality. There are definitely benefits of discussing eating quality with consumers. I don’t like the term ‘commodity beef’. Brazilian beef has a different standard to Australian, to Irish, to British to French, and we should champion those differences and look to tell a story around it.

RS: In Australia they are using ultrasound on the animal to see how much marbling is inside and testing methane levels. But grass-fed animals are all eating different amounts and will all taste all a bit different, so consistency is hard.

JL: The consistency of each animal in our shop is slightly different, the taste is always good but the marbling on one might be slightly more than another. We are quite strict on the body size, we don’t take anything more than 180kg a side, but ultimately each animal, even though they’ve been in the same field and are the same breed, will be different. Grading is difficult when you blanket it, each animal is different.

RC: How do we get away from the inconsistency in retail? You can buy [some steak] from a mainstream retailer that can be very good one day and the following week the cut on it can be rubbish – it’s not marbled to the same level and not the same thing at all and the consumer is disheartened by that.

JL: For us having consistency is key - your worst-case scenario for consistency has to be the bar, and if it’s better that’s brilliant but it can’t ever fall below that. If I give someone a bad steak it will end up costing me more.

A new generation of meat eaters

IG: The younger generation have better knowledge of food than the older generation. They follow a lot of social media, and they know a lot about meat, how they want it cooked and to taste. They are more interested about what they eat and where it is coming from. They like to try steaks from different breeds and countries.

JL: There is consistent growth in the number of young people coming into the shop, often with their parents picking out steaks. The main thing I have noticed is when customers try to swap and go to supermarkets it is their children who notice that they didn’t buy it from us.

MB: My kids have steak Tuesday every week, but that probably because they have been brought up eating meat. But they stick to that.

FS: We opened a restaurant in Westfield, and we specifically targeted a younger age group on social media, and it generated an enormous number of people to show up for a specific event.

Thanks to Flat Iron for hosting the discussion.