When it comes to getting a meal on the table, food provenance isn't always synonymous with a quick and easy feed.
But Dalby's Jilly Tyler believes that the two can go hand in hand.
Her fledgling company Busy Beef aims to connect small to medium producers selling secondary cuts with time poor consumers who still care about food provenance, offering up value added, ready to cook beef products.
Ms Tyler, whose family were lotfeeders at the predominantly family-owned Sandalwood Feedlot for more than 30 years before selling earlier this year, is a health professional by trade but has now come full circle to her cattle industry roots.
She started exploring the idea through Meat and Livestock Australia's Young Food Innovators program and is now hoping to take to learn more about how to grow the business through her involvement with Toowoomba and Surat Basin Enterprise's Emerging Exporters program.
"I did a lot of consumer interviews and determined that the meal had to be on the table in 30 minutes," she said.
"The cuts have to be ready to go and you can just add your own vegetables and sauces. This is somewhere in between going to your butcher and buying raw meat and going to Woolworths and buying prepared beef meals.
"I started with the idea of the busy family but ironically in my trials I found a key customer is really young professionals, often men, who don't want to live on McDonalds, who don't like to cook but care about where their food comes from and the health aspects of it."
Ms Tyler is exploring three main cuts to be used in the business- bolar blade, chuck and intercostals. She's hoping to launch the business by Christmas using wholesale meat and is already in talks with a Dalby butcher to kick off the company close to home.
The next step will be getting local producers on board as a source of the secondary cuts, with some talks already underway.
"People do want to know where their food comes from...I think there's an amazing opportunity there to meet that demand," Ms Tyler said.
Ms Tyler and husband Kelvin run their own cropping business on about 1255ha outside of Dalby, close to her parents Kev and Jan Roberts, and sister and brother-in-law, Meg and Warren Salter, who all also run their own farming businesses.
Ms Tyler said the family's feedlot background had been invaluable in providing her the background and connections to get Busy Beef off the ground.
"I wouldn't have got to even this point without people within the industry who have been prepared to give advice and feedback," she said.
"I have received a lot of support from MLA and it was wonderful to be chosen for Emerging Exporters. I'm not at the export-ready point but it's great that they're willing to take people like me on the journey."
