A focus on tenderness and consistency, and some great word-of-mouth reviews has seen Bannock Brae Meats at Meringandan grow its paddock to plate operation.
Owned by Kieren and Andrea Luck, the business has seen success from a shopfront retail outlet at Highfields near Toowoomba, servicing customers as far as Bedourie to Brisbane, and working closely with several restaurants in Brisbane.
"Tenderness and consistency is key," Kieren said.
"If you buy a side of beef off me and you ring me up in six months time saying that meat was beautiful and I’ll take more, when you get the next one, it should be as good as the first one you got."
Kieren is a fifth generation cattle producer, and qualified butcher who purchased a butcher shop at Highfields in 1993 and has been involved in the meat industry in different ways ever since.
"There's been a few changes to butchering since I started out," Kieren said.
"The biggest thing would be different cuts used for different things.
"In the 90s, lamb shanks were dog food, you’d sell them for 50 cents each and couldn’t get rid of them for dog food, and now they’re a delicacy.
"The biggest thing you’ll see in butchering is those reality TV cooking shows they have where they’re all doing beef cheeks, briskets, and pork belly; all those things were second-grade things no one wanted to touch."
Building the Bannock Brae butcher-shop in 2005 as a way to drought-proof their operation, Kieren and Andrea have combined their love of breeding cattle with his butchering expertise to give customers the best possible product at the best price.
Spread across 688 hectares of grazing country that runs to creek flats on Meringadan’s outskirts over two properties, Erinvale and Bannock Brae, the Lucks breed 50 per cent of the cattle that go through their butchershop.
"The rest is store cattle that I buy in at around 250kg," Kieren said.
"We fatten them through to be carcasses of 200kg when they're dressed, giving them as long as they need to get to that weight, and I hand-pick them every week to take them to the abattoirs.
"If they’re not good enough, they don't go."
Times are tougher this year because of drought but Kieren's pickiness when it comes to the cattle he buys in means quality hasn't been affected.
"The problem will come when it rains and the cattle get really short," Kieren said.
"I'm just trying to keep all my breeders by supplementing them through so when it does rain, I’ve still got a supply.
"Our philosophy the whole time has been to let our product do the talking.
"People get to hear about us through word of mouth and that’s the best advertising you can get."
