How to Embrace Carcass Balance In Your Restaurant

Alex Keys is Co-Owner at Farmer Tom Jones, a butcher’s shop based in Spa Terminus, Bermondsey (UK). The butchery is a collaborative effort among four equal partners, Alex explains. As the business name suggests, Tom Jones is FTJ’s farmer and procurer of meat, and has been farming and sourcing native breed animals since 2002. “I'm the head of the butchers — sort of a General Manager,” Alex continues. “Olly Seabright is our Head Butcher and butchery insight guru, and Mike Davies (who also owns the Camberwell Arms) really keeps the whole ship together, managing sales and pulling us all in the right direction.”

We asked Alex to chat to us about the importance of carcass balance and how restaurants can work more closely with butchers to ensure that everyone wins: farmer, butcher, restaurant and customer.

What is carcass balance?

Carcass balance is the practice of ensuring that all parts of a slaughtered animal are used at similar rates. “Simply put, there is only 2-3kg of rib eye from a side of beef, only 12-15 pork chops on a pig — we have to be aware that the rest of the animal remains hanging in the cold stores. Obviously, we can make hams and sausages and mince, but there are loads of other interesting cuts,” says Alex.

“With beef, you can cut the shoulder into chunks and braise the whole thing. But you can also extract steaks like Denver, flat iron, under blade fillet… the list goes on. These are often well-marbled and tender cuts for which you can charge real money. They can be time consuming to extract, but a butcher can do that work for the restaurant. Often, a chef will be buying a whole pig without realising it: loin for chops, belly for porchetta, shoulder for roasts on a Sunday. We can brine hams or make sausages with the leg and trim. With some planning, your week in the kitchen can revolve around using whole animals — the menu writes itself.”

Balancing the sale of popular cuts with less-desired parts of the animal means that both farmers and butchers can avoid waste and maintain profitability. This keeps meat production economically viable (especially for smaller businesses), while also meaning fewer animals need to be reared and slaughtered overall — vastly reducing the environmental impact of your restaurant. Other benefits of carcass balance include:

• Improved creativity: When your chefs are challenged to use a wider variety of cuts across their menus, this can encourage greater culinary creativity.
• Increased profit margins: Utilising every piece of meat — from prime cuts to less popular ones — can maximise your profitability on each carcass purchased.
• Reduce waste: Your efforts to tackle food waste shouldn’t be restricted to within the walls of your establishment, but should also include your supply chain. Embracing carcass balance is one way to reduce waste from farm level onwards.
• Stand out from the crowd: Using less common cuts in innovative ways can help differentiate your menus from those of your competitors.
• Reduce Scope 3 emissions: Scope 3 emissions (those that occur throughout the value chain) are notoriously both the hardest to tackle and, for hospitality businesses, the most significant. By limiting the number of animals reared for your kitchen, you’ll be taking a significant step in reducing your Scope 3 impact.
• Appeal to environmentally-conscious customers: A commitment to using the whole animal and working directly with farmers and butchers gives you a great story to tell, meeting a growing consumer interest in sustainable practices and farm-to-table provenance and building a positive brand image. 

What your butcher can bring to the table

In acting as a connection between the farmer and the chef, butchers offer valuable guidance and practical support. “I think chefs need to understand that rearing an animal in the sort of way they would like isn't a cheap thing to do. It's a real waiting game to see a return on investment. We have to share the story, and we have to make it as convenient and accessible as possible for chefs to buy the meat,” says Alex. 

“For us, the biggest thing we want to promote is using whole animals. That’s where our knowledge as cooks as well as butchers comes in,” he continues. “There are lots of really exciting and delicious cuts on animals beyond the loin: that's where we have to build trust. If restaurants see happy animals with the farmer and we deliver a good service and are in an open and constructive dialogue with the cooks, then everyone benefits. The butcher is the middleman; it's a really privileged position.”

Some restaurants do embrace bringing butchery into their kitchens, upskilling as necessary so that they can purchase whole or half animals at a time and break them down in-house. While this is fantastic in theory, it’s not achievable for every business, requiring time, skill and space — all premium demands for a busy kitchen.

A great alternative is to look for a partnership with a butcher who can take care of this work for you. “The simple fact is that restaurants are struggling with rising costs and customers have less money to spend,” Alex points out. “If you buy portioned steaks, you know exactly how much they cost and exactly how much you can make on each one — but if you're buying half a cow, that takes time. It's usually a senior member of staff breaking it down, and it may cost more than some untraceable, unknown meat. That's why we offer more butchery to our customers. Tom could see that cooks were struggling to take the half and whole animals — even when they wanted to, even when they knew the provenance and quality.”

“A lot of chefs want to work in this way — they just aren't exposed to it. They’re busy and time is at a premium. But when they come into the butchers or onto Tom’s farm, they understand. We have to be proactive in getting chefs to visit us and see that we are practicing what we preach. We can stand by the fact we only buy whole animals; if you look in our fridge, you won’t see rails of pork loins and foreribs. It would probably make us more money, but it's not what we're about.”

What does ‘better meat’ mean to a butcher?

“Better meat is traceable meat, where you know the farmer, their methods and the slaughterhouse,” says Alex. “Consumers now want tender meat and marbling; they don't want too much exterior fat. That’s quite a specific set of requirements and, if you raise an animal largely outdoors, it’s not always guaranteed — but variety is the stuff of life. Butchers, chefs and consumers need to trust their taste more. Quality meat will be varied, the taste will be better, and you’ll be supporting an economic ecosystem as well as the natural ecosystem.”

At Farmer Tom Jones, they focus on native breeds. “They were selected over generations to thrive on our landscapes,” Alex explains. “Tom is in Herefordshire, and Hereford beef is widely regarded around the world to be exceptional quality, so it makes sense for us to rear, buy and sell it. Same goes with our pigs and sheep. It’s not because we don't think breeds from other countries are great — we know they are, but we want to celebrate British farming and British breeds. They are often slower to mature, but we don't need to rush."

The animals’ lifestyle matters, too. “Where possible, we want our animals to live the majority of their lives outdoors on a varied diet, with some grazing and foraging,” Alex explains. “There can also be supplementary feed: Tom sources whey from Neal's Yard Dairy to feed to the pigs and takes excess fodder beet for the cattle and sheep. While conservation grazing animals live a completely idyllic lifestyle on pasture, this wouldn't necessarily result in the best eating meat. This is the thing with farming; it's so nuanced. Customers and chefs just want to hear ‘pasture fed’ or ‘outdoor bred’, but when it’s hammering down rain, the truth is that the pigs prefer to be in a dry shed!”

All of this hard work pays off in terms of quality. “We’ve done a few taste comparisons with meat from other well-known butchers and the difference is noticeable. We recently did a test with some Hereford beef mince from Neville Eckley, aged for four weeks in our fridge, then cut and blended by us. Compared with some mince from another supplier, we were surprised how stark the difference was. A lot of that lies in how we age the beef. It's disingenuous to say that meat in supermarkets is bad meat; there are a lot of good animals in the meat industry, but the meat doesn't always get handled with much care.”

The struggles with modern farming

Alex wraps us by listing some of the issues that are make life difficult for farmers in the UK, with financial and legislative pressures mounting. “Supermarkets have continually driven down the price they will pay farmers for meat — therefore driving down the price that consumers are willing to pay. With overzealous bureaucracy and too many hoops to jump through on matters like TB, the result is farmers giving up and reducing their numbers of livestock,” he says. “The average age of a farmer in the UK today is late 50s to early 60s. Their children have grown up seeing issues like foot and mouth and rising debt, and understandably don't want to take on the family business. It's the classic ‘scorch the earth and move on’ story. Now you have supermarkets buying beef from places like Uruguay because it's too expensive here… but it's too expensive as a result of supermarkets driving down prices in the first place.”

The bottom line, he says, is that consumers need to eat less meat. “Otherwise, it's really simple: the quality of meat will get worse and despondent farmers will move more and more towards an American-style system with feedlots. This is worse for the animals living their lives in sheds, and worse for us as we vicariously ingest antibiotics.” By serving less-but-better meat and telling the stories behind each dish, restaurants can play an enormous role in encouraging this dietary transition. Working closely with butchers makes this infinitely more achievable — a win for everyone from farm to fork.

Farmer Tom Jones is located in Spa Terminus, Bermondsey, London, and is open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays from 9am-3pm. For more insights and stories from across our global network, follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn and sign up to our newsletter!