Selling your beef

When you are faced with selling beef for the first time, there are a number of challenges you will face.  The abattoir, I hope, I have covered adequately.  Now, how do you sell the beef?  It is a good plan to have your sales lined up well before collecting the meat.  Have a spreadsheet on which you record your customers’ purchases. Then update this with POSSIBLE if a customer may want beef at some specified or at any time, but DEFINITE when you are close to delivery.  Keep contact details on the spreadsheet or your ‘phone.  When organised it is quite quick to run through your list to make the sales.

Of course, when you start, you won’t have this wealth of knowledge.  In our early days, we relied on approaching friends, colleagues and also a local mail drop.  Now we have married children who have friends and colleagues to whom they are more than happy to extol the virtues of our beef.  These customers then have dinner parties which may result in more interest.  Our mail drop many years ago produced a few one-off customers but some have stayed with us ever since.  You will find that such is the quality of dexter beef, they will often be waiting for your call.

A dexter is not a particularly large animal, so we divide each animal into eight boxes which will weigh typically between 15kg to 20kg.  The fillet should be sold separately as it is too small to divide eight ways.  You could sell the animal in bits but there is a serious danger that you will be left with a lot of lesser cuts, for example, so it is best to sell a bit of everything to everyone.  Provide advice on what to do with the different cuts if your customer is unsure.  Many people can’t think beyond rump, fillet, topside and mince!  They will need educating in the joys of Jacob’s ladder, bone-in rib joints and leg of mutton cut.  Early market research of your customer base is worthwhile to establish whether they may like burgers or beef sausages which butchers will make for you.  You can end up with a lot of stewing steak and mince. Mince is very popular these days so a lot of it may be received with gratitude.  We tend to have most stewing steak made into joints which can be slow roasted or cut up for stewing if preferred.