ABP Beef is one of Europe’s largest privately owned beef processors and it processes more than one million cattle every year from farms throughout Ireland, the UK and Poland.
The company, whose headquarters are in Ardee, Co Louth, produces branded beef products and supplies the food-service and manufacturing sectors. Its client portfolio includes leading retailers and more than 40 Michelin Star restaurants throughout Europe. A number of its beef products have won 'Great taste' awards as well as the accolade of 'World's Best Steak' by Beef magazine.
Innovation has been a feature of the company’s operations for many years. In the 1980s, it developed a patented process to guarantee consistency and tenderness in beef. This is known as ‘ultra tender’ and is a hanging process that increases the natural breakdown of muscle fibres in each carcass while it hangs prior to de-boning. The company has also created a method of sympathetically chilling the carcass to prevent cold shortening to further ensure tenderness. Given recent concerns about the integrity of meat supplies, ABP is also working on a comprehensive system to ensure full traceability along the supply chain from farm to fork is imperative, and which involves DNA testing through all of the company’s plants. This ensures any cut of meat can be traced from the supermarket shelf back to the animal it came from, with a permanent database of all the information about the animal’s provenance.
ABP's slaughter facilities are strategically placed so that animals fit for slaughter are transported short distances to ensure better meat quality. The facilities are situated in superior beef-rearing regions where effective grassland-management techniques are the norm.
Waste minimised
Advice is provided to farmers on sustainability issues on the farm and techniques to improve efficiency. The supply chain has been adapted so that waste is minimised and ABP ensures packaging within its supply chain is limited and in many cases eliminated. Its finished retail packs, for example, are transported in recycled trays which are returned and washed for reuse.
ABP has been awarded Carbon Trust certification for carbon and water reduction. “We take the environmental sustainability of the business extremely serious and have introduced commitments to reduce energy use by 20 per cent and our carbon footprint by 25 per cent before 2020,” says APB chief executive Finbarr McDonnell.