British Wagyu: Building a quality beef brand on taste and texture

British Wagyu is the fastest growing UK beef breed, though from a small base.

Wagyu-cross calf registrations rose 30% in the period January to November 2022 compared with the same period a year earlier, as dairy farmers take to the breed for ease of calving and getting cows to milk quickly.

See also: Wagyu beef market – tradition and change in Japan

While interest in the breed has been growing for some years, it is being accelerated by a concept which sees the production of animals with measurable and increasingly reliable eating quality in a series of integrated steps, from calf producer to finisher.   

East Yorkshire based Warrendale Wagyu is raising the profile and sales of British Wagyu beef by providing an increasingly consistent product.

To do this it tracks performance related to sire, with growth measured at all stages; it grades and pays on marbling quality and matches farmers in different stages of the chain to place cattle on suitable holdings.

As consumer recognition of the superior taste and eating quality of meat from the breed has risen, Warrendale’s retail, online, restaurant, wholesale and export sales have grown from 10 carcasses a week five years ago to 130 finished cattle a week.

Founder Jim Bloom has had Wagyu cattle for about 15 years but founded the Warrendale Wagyu brand just over five years ago, initially supplying mainly the London market with those 10 carcasses a week.

Now, with two high profile retail customers – Waitrose and Aldi – it has a far greater reach and is slaughtering more than 100 cattle a week through Dovecote Park and is aiming for 500-plus a week in the next five years.

The business also sells to high-end restaurants and takes between 200 and 500 direct-sales parcel orders a week through its website, 76% of which are placed by mobile phone.

As well as in-store promotions, marketing is helped by “selling the meal, not the meat”, through influencers demonstrating tempting and easy ways to cook Wagyu beef.

Fixed prices at stages  

The chain provides an assured market at a price fixed annually for dairy-cross calves using Wagyu semen, with bulls and heifers valued equally.

Prices are set every September for the following year, also for rearers, growers and finishers, with a premium for high marbling scores – the prime quality measure.    

At the end of each stage the company buys the animal from the farmer and sells it to the next stage in the chain.

A farmer can cover one, two, three or all four stages of production, with the animal then being bought by Warrendale once finished.

After weaning, the cattle are grown mainly on forage, followed by high-starch finishing feeds to encourage marbling. Starches fed include maize silage, crimped barley and distillers’ grains.

The company is not prescriptive about which starches are used, so these can include food products such as waste chips. Support is offered to farmers by a full-time nutritionist.

The breed is docile and, according to producers at the recent British Wagyu conference in Shropshire, has high calf survival rates.

Growth rates are measured and tracked throughout the life of the animal, with calves DNA-tagged at birth so that progeny can be verified back to the sire, helping to inform breeding and management decisions.

“The first five years have been about building the model and a bit of scale,” says Warrendale Wagyu managing director Tom Richardson.

“The next five years will be data-driven, with the potential to grow the cattle more efficiently, but quality is first and foremost.”

Tom says there is a huge export opportunity, but this has to be carefully assessed, especially as the home market is growing so fast.

Currently, the business exports to continental Europe – mainly Germany – but there is potential in the Far East and the US.

More farmers are needed to meet rapidly growing domestic demand.

“We’ve got some retailers and other markets strongly committed to us and pushing for more, but we need to protect the brand, promote the brand and the breed,” he says.

“Provenance and DNA traceability is at the heart of everything we do.”

Marbling scores

Marbling scores run from one to nine and are now assessed using Meat Industry Japan camera grading, replacing the previous hand-held card system.

The results are transmitted immediately to Australia for independent verification and received back in the UK within a few minutes.

Carcasses must be chilled for 48 hours before this measurement can be made, to allow the fat to set.

At the top end, a carcass scoring a nine merits the description shimofuri, which translates from the Japanese as “frosted”, where the intramuscular fat appears as a fine mesh.

Aiming for ever-higher marbling scores, finished cattle in the brand have improved by almost one marble grade score in the past three years, to average 5.8 to 5.9.

About 60% of carcasses fall into grades five to six, with 20% scoring seven to nine and 20% at three or four.

While carcasses are also graded on the Europ grid, it is the marbling measure that produces any premium. Those which do not make the required marbling grade receive the base price but no penalty.

Carcass weights

Carcass weights fall into two main groups, with the aim of finishing a 27-28-month animal at 400-420kg deadweight and a 25-26-month animal at about 335kg.