The burger restaurant has abandoned its innovative model of buying entire cow carcasses and is re-focusing its support for regenerative beef farming. By Nick Hughes.
I’m standing in a sodden field near Retford in Nottinghamshire. The rain continues to lash down as Joe Howard talks a group of journalists through the finer points of the outdoor forage-based system used to rear his herd of Aberdeen Angus and Hereford-cross cattle. Flanked by among others his father and business partner, Max, Howard seems perfectly at one with his surroundings as he leans casually against a spade and espouses the benefits to soil health of having cows graze land that is also used to produce vegetables and arable crops – one of a number of regenerative farming principles he has adopted as part of his membership of the Grassroots Farming collective of beef farmers.
The visit is being hosted by Honest Burgers, the high street burger chain which has been a prominent advocate for regenerative agriculture, and which until recently was disrupting the traditional beef supply chain by purchasing the entire carcass from Grassroots farmers.
Yet the trip to Retford marks the start of a new phase in Honest’s support for regenerative beef farming. After several years spent trying to make the complex model work, co-founder Tom Barton and his team have admitted defeat and are re-orientating their support by paying a levy on every kilo of beef purchased from Grassroots farmers.
In so doing Barton has – I sense somewhat reluctantly – broken the direct link between the regenerative techniques practised by Grassroots farmers and the burger that ends up on the customer’s plate, with beef now being purchased entirely from Gloucestershire-based supplier Foyle Food Group.
That Barton is prepared to share openly the challenges associated with the previous model shows a commendable commitment to living Honest’s eponymous brand values. It also shows the structural challenges hospitality sector buyers will have to overcome if they want to purchase food traceable to regenerative systems – beef or otherwise – at scale.
Complex chain
Currently, most beef produced in regenerative farming systems ends up in the same supply chain as beef produced conventionally. The model of buying the entire carcass initially made sense to Barton since the business already had “one of the most integrated supply chains of any restaurant”. Honest has its own central butchery and preparation kitchen meaning it has the ability to source and buy products direct from farmers in ways that other, less integrated businesses cannot.
Yet the harsh reality of trying to disrupt a long-established, highly sophisticated supply chain soon hit home after Honest began shifting towards the new model during the covid-19 pandemic. “When we started the concept, we were hoping to be able to deliver more value off the carcass,” Barton explains. “We were chatting to people about bones for broth, hides for the fashion industry, all these different elements of the carcass that we thought if we can find other businesses to come on board then we can make this happen. And what we found is it’s just such a complex supply chain to try and tap into. If you take hides, for example, we needed to create something like 150 hides in order for that to then become enough volume for tanneries in the UK to even look at. Trying to stitch all these things together was really, really difficult for us as a business.”
Reluctant wholesaler
Honest found itself effectively acting as a meat wholesaler, selling cuts to butchers like The Ethical Butcher and Turner & George. Here too the business’s good intentions rubbed up against market realities. “When we’re selling premium regenerative steaks to third party suppliers, they want a certain spec of steak,” says Barton. “If they’re selling that steak to a high level restaurant, it needs to be the right shape, it needs to have the right kind of marbling, it needs to have the right depth of flavour; it needs to have all these things.”
Although Grassroots’s regenerative farming systems produced consistently high quality meat, when issues with specification did arise the commercial impact was felt by Honest and the farmers. “It just felt like a process that we were really positive about wasn’t actually working for us and wasn’t working for our farmers,” Barton tells Footprint. As he notes candidly: “Honest doesn’t want to be a meat wholesaler. We like being a restaurant.”
Everything about the new model was costly, both financially and in terms of the extra human resource needed to operate it, which weighed heavily on the business at a time when the costs associated with running a restaurant were already increasing. Barton admits to eating a “fairly large dose of humble pie” as he grew to appreciate how specialist meat businesses have over decades invested millions in creating highly streamlined supply chains. “They extract every possible penny of value from that animal. They use systems that have been honed over the years to perfect them so that they can serve the needs of the industry. For us we dabbled, we hoped we would get where we needed to be, but ultimately the impact we were having on our farmers wasn’t always positive.”
Alastair Trickett, co-founder of Grassroots Farming, says one of the concerns among farmers was whether the new model would prove even less commercially viable as it scaled. “We had in the back of our minds that we’d been working on this [model] with Honest since 2020, we’d got to a third of their supply (in volume terms), and I think we both took a step back and thought, ‘this is great, we’ve achieved something here but this is hard work and is it sustainable?’”
New model
In the event, Trickett says Grassroots farmers were fully supportive of the shift to the new model, which essentially adopts a mass balance approach; Honest pays a levy on every kilogram of beef it purchases (totalling £250,000 this year) which Grassroots then distributes among farmers who have been certified to its standard.
Barton says it took him some time to get his head around the new concept – not least because the burgers they’d be serving up wouldn’t be from regenerative farms. He compares the new model to that of purchasing renewable energy. “If you buy renewable electricity, you don’t get renewable electricity actively sent through those cables in your home, you just bought it from the market and obviously the hope is that one day there’ll be more renewable electricity in the market than there will be non-renewable. That’s what we’re trying to do with Grassroots. We’re trying to see if we can promote more farmers to farm this way and also get more businesses to join us and fund this kind of farming, and ultimately show people that this is a totally feasible option.”
Ultimately, what swung it for Barton was how the new approach allows Grassroots farmers to focus purely on farming in a more sustainable way. “They don’t have to worry too much about the end product, where it goes, what the spec is, has it got the right fat content, the right marbling, does it convert to burgers well? All these things are off their worry list and they can crack on with farming and getting the best out of their land and the best out of their animals, and we pay them a premium for doing so.”
Communication challenge
The shift in approach inevitably makes it more challenging to communicate to consumers over the benefits of regenerative farming since it is no longer regeneratively-sourced beef inside the bun. Barton says Honest has been “fairly quiet” about its regenerative messaging for some time now for that exact reason – “the last thing we want is for anyone to feel misled by what we’re trying to do.” He adds that the brand team is currently looking at how to communicate the nuance between Honest supporting regenerative agriculture financially and directly sourcing regenerative beef.
As for the producers themselves, although Trickett says he understands the narrative that we need to reconnect farmers with the end consumer, he suggests the more fundamental considerations are: “Do farmers get a premium to incentivise them and enable them to make a change? Do they get support from professionals? And do they become part of a community which is supportive and gives them the courage to take the next steps? I think all of those actually are higher order priorities for farmers [than knowing where their food ends up].”
The guaranteed sum of money received from a business like Honest allows Grassroots to push farmers to be more ambitious in the regenerative practices they are adopting. “And there is still that connection [with Honest Burger],” Trickett believes. “It’s just not necessarily the connection that the beef you’re eating has come from my farm.”
He also stresses that the segregated supply chain model has not reached a dead end. Grassroots is working with a supplier to Fuller’s to provide the pub and hotel group with carcass beef – a more viable model given Fuller’s significant size and diverse menu. “They have pies, burgers, roasts and steaks, so they’re able to balance the carcass within their whole estate,” Trickett explains. “There’s always going to be companies that can do that.”
Will more businesses take the plunge and go straight to the source? And will they be able to make it work? As Honest Burgers can attest: if you don’t try, you’ll never know.
