Meat Talk

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...

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...

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...

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...