Neat Meat founder Simon Eriksen says the future of New Zealand’s red meat industry lies with increasing beef finishing efficiency.
“Over the next five to 10 years farmers need to look harder at changing beef breeds to move their cattle through quicker.
“You cannot afford to hold stock over three winters.
“It is obviously better to get the full value of the animal at 500 days of age rather than 1000 and finish them during their second winter.”
The meat industry also needs to find ways to add value to the greater parts of the carcase that are not top-end table cuts.
Eriksen sees the dairy industry as being an increasing source of beef as the limits go on the expansion of the hill country beef herds.
More than 180,000 stock units have been replaced by trees in the North Island or 20,000 equivalent cattle.
With the national kill of 3,840,000 declining this year by 3% that is total of 115,000 beef cattle missing.
Beef breeds that cross well over dairy cows are likely to see the most growth in the next few years and that is a huge opportunity for the Speckle Park breed.
The dairy industry also needs to find ways of humanely and profitably dealing with 2 million bobby calves annually, which is an opportunity for the whole meat industry.
It has been a paddock-to-plate journey in the meat industry for Eriksen, one of three brothers in an east coast farming family west of Gisborne.
After Massey and a degree in agribusiness he went OE to London, where he worked on farming wild boars to supply free range pork to Waitrose.
Back home in 2001 he began Neat Meat by supplying Australian beef to Auckland restaurants, forming enduring relationships in the hospitality trade.
Switching to NZ-sourced meats, he moved into differentiated meat types and cuts and then into branded products, being in at the ground floor with Angus Pure.
Simon was joined in the company by his brothers Will and Tim Eriksen and Andy Ham and while the company is much bigger than the three brothers, it will always be a family business.
Neat Meat, along with Mark Hunter, bought Harmony Meats off the Wallace Corporation in 2010, adding organic beef and lamb to the free range pork.
In 2014 they partnered up with Mike and Sharon Barton to introduce Taupo Beef to the stable.
Eriksen and his team now manage 20 meat and poultry brands.
One of the newest is Speckle Beef, now supplied to 60 restaurants and eight premium butchers, and beginning to find export markets around resorts in the Pacific Islands.
Neat Meat also sells Speckle Beef online.
“Speckle Park is the perfect breed where everything comes together – good size and temperament, moderate birth weights, fast finishing with high marbling percentages, distinctive colour-coated, environmentally sustainable, and expressing dominance with these characteristics in the F1 crosses.
“Our development as a company and brand experiences beforehand have culminated in Speckle Beef.
“We workshopped the naming of the brand and initially we sought to exclude the cattle breed name, but now Speckle Beef says it all really – coat colours and marbling as the defining characteristics.”
Neat Meat’s processing partners are Alliance Group at Mataura and Levin and Taylor Preston in Wellington.
Neat Meat offers cattle suppliers premiums for marbling score over the prime price schedules – 20c/kg extra for scores 2 and 3, 40c for scores 4 and 5 and 60c for 6 and above.
Through the meat companies and livestock agencies it sources reliable finishing farmers who produce mainly Speckle Park F1 steers and heifers.
“The fundamentals of a meat brand are good genetics and good farming with strong and trusted relationships along the supply chain.
“In the evolution of beef brands, Angus Pure was about the breed, Taupo Beef was about care for the environment and Speckle Beef is a combination of everything we have learnt over the 20-plus years of this company.”
Grading and verification are important parts of the whole eating experience for consumers, along with quality and variety of the lesser cuts.
“We have paid the farmer a premium and we need to recover that with the quality and the good story, from paddock to plate.”
The F1 crossing over dairy cows is the way of the future, where verified Speckle Park bulls and semen produce easy-calving, fast-growing calves that express beef marbling at a young age.
The coat markings are so dominant that cattle with lower percentages of Speckle Park can grow quickly but not express the marbling, which then becomes a waste of time along the value chain.
“Speckle Park grows quality and grazing efficiency by using the dairy-cross resource and getting to market without a second winter.”
Simon Eriksen said he would love to see specialty butchers telling stories about their meats, offering a range of quality alternatives and not confining themselves to stocking just one origin.
“Consumers would have many choices and they will select like they do in wine stores, from the range of pinot noir or chardonnay.”
The restaurant equivalent would be front-of-house staff telling the authentic stories about options on the menus.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was produced and published with the support of Specklebeef New Zealand.
