DEAR SIR, With Brexit coming, now is an ideal opportunity for the beef industry as a whole to look to a better grading system which places greater emphasis on eating quality, and can be a win for farmers and consumers.

The fact that an animal has a massive set of hams doesn’t enter into the thoughts of our customers when they are buying our product. Yet, the current grading system favours this muscle over what the consumer really wants to know – is the meat succulent, tasty and juicy?

As an industry, we know that beef relies on its eating quality to compete with chicken or pork as the meat of choice in the shopping basket. Therefore, we seriously have to ask ourselves why we continue to grade our animals rather than our meat?

A new system which places eating quality front and centre will drive up quality and ultimately the reputation of the Northern Ireland beef industry as a whole.

In recent years, I have travelled across the United States and Canada visiting different ranches and beef farms and talking to key players in the industry. From those visits, it is abundantly clear that the business of beef has evolved well beyond the EUROP grading system.

Consumers demand a good eating experience – and a new grading system can deliver this for the Northern Ireland industry.

This was also the conclusion of a large-scale trial carried out while I was a member of Sainsbury’s Beef Steering Committee. Our findings completely contradicted the current EUROP grading system, with heavy-muscled animals including Limousins, scoring much lower in taste and succulence than homebred cattle such as Aberdeen Angus and Hereford.

Brexit provides the perfect opportunity for the industry as a whole to work together to grasp the nettle and establish a more integrated chain from farm to fork. This will result in multiple benefits including increased levels of feedback to farmers, which will enable us to plan for the future, as well as delivering increasing efficiencies and savings across the entire system.

Perhaps, most importantly, a new system focused on delivering the best eating quality will drive up the consumer experience and increase the popularity of beef as the meat of choice on the dinner table.

If we are to increase the fortunes of the local beef industry, we must adapt and we must change. We cannot remain wedded to a grading system which was developed in the 1970s to buy intervention beef.

See more letters, p24.