It’s quite easy to forget who the most important person in the beef industry really is – the consumer. Be it on a supermarket shelf or on a Michelin Star menu, keeping beef high on the consumer’s preference list is crucial for the well-being of everyone involved in beef production.

Prevailing consumer desires already affect our production decisions: shoppers tend towards small, more manageable steak cuts, which is the driving force behind carcase weight limits. In addition, many are willing to pay more for cuts from certain breeds, hence breed premiums.

A new Irish development in beef breeding has the potential to further bridge the gap between producer and consumer. Genetic selection for meat eating quality is now a reality. The ICBF, in collaboration with Teagasc Ashtown, has developed a beef eating-quality breeding index. The index is based on measuring heritable beef eating-quality traits.

A heritable trait is one that is passed from a parent to offspring – the more heritable the trait, the more it can be affected by breeding. There are three main meat eating-quality traits, tenderness, juiciness and flavour. Heritability for these is quite good when compared with other common traits (Figure 1).

Building an index

To date, data from 1,200 bulls tested at Tully has been used to develop the index. Strict production and slaughter protocols were followed (facilitated by Slaney Foods International) to ensure that results were not skewed through management.

Eight 1in sirloin steaks were collected from each animal. A number were sent for sensory analysis by trained tasting assessors at Eolas International Research in Co Cork, while the others were tested for tenderness (shear force) and composition in the laboratories at Teagasc Food Centre, Ashtown.

A large amount of variation was recorded between samples and the team identified the parentage lines that correspond with this variation. A list of the current commercial AI sires performing well on the meat eating quality index is outlined in Table 1. Interestingly, not one single breed is outperforming another in terms of meat quality so far. Within every breed there appears to be animals that produce beef of high eating quality and likewise animals whose meat is of a lesser quality.

Breed

This might come as a surprise to those of the opinion that traditional breeds produce a better-quality steak. However, breed-driven beef tastes and price premiums are often based on research from countries which tend towards a fatter beef carcase, such as the USA.

Fat is a huge driver of beef flavour. In practice, Irish cattle are slaughtered much leaner than cattle in these countries, which is why these eating quality differences do not always manifest themselves here. Based on the results, each animal was assigned an economic breeding value (EBV) for meat quality. At present, the value is simply a numeric figure reported to one decimal place.

The next step is to assign a monetary value to each unit on the beef eating-quality index. In other words, disseminate the financial gain, if any, from breeding an animal with genetic potential to produce high-quality beef.

BEEF 2016 consumer tasting trials

The index was tested on the general public at BEEF 2016 in Grange recently. Consumers were offered two pieces of steak, both from bulls of the same breed, but one from a bull belonging to a high beef-quality genetic line and the other from a bull scoring lower in terms of genetic beef-eating quality.

Tasting was blind and tasters were asked to pick the better-quality beef of the two. The test was repeated seven times, with different consumers for each pair of bulls. The results are outlined in Table 2.

Tasters agreed with the beef quality index 75% of the time. To put this in perspective, when marketing meat, supermarkets would be happy with 15% to 20% agreement in similar tests of eating quality.

Interestingly, within the Aberdeen Angus comparison at Grange, all seven tasters agreed with the beef quality index when selecting their favourite, which shows that within the supposed premium beef breed there is both high- and low-quality beef-producing animals.

Remember that these bulls were raised and slaughtered under similar conditions and were of similar ages and carcase grades – any difference is purely down to genetics.

The future

What does it all mean? Tully centre manager Dr Stephen Conroy says that in the future there may be potential for processors to earmark higher-quality cuts for more lucrative markets.

“The holy grail is obviously where a buyer or consumer pays more for meat from an animal with superior eating-quality genetics and subsequently farmers are paid a premium for producing that animal. At present, there are premiums based on genetics (breed), but this work is much more accurate and up to date,” he said.

“We hope to be in a position to publish genetic evaluations in autumn 2017. Then each animal can be assigned with an index value for beef quality, just like they are for calving difficulty or milk yield. The question will then be whether the trait is incorporated into an animal’s overall terminal index value.

“For that to happen, there will have to be a monetary gain for the farmer in it. Whether that happens will obviously depend on how the index develops – we have 1,200 animals tested so far and the plan is for a total of 7,500 to be tested initially.

“Also, it must be pushed and marketed correctly. There’s a bit to go yet, but it’s extremely promising so far,” he concluded.