Episode Summary

In this episode, Richard interviews Chris, co-founder of Provenir, to discuss the importance of transparency and sustainability in the food industry. They delve into the conventional methods of meat production and highlight the need for a more ethical and environmentally friendly approach. Chris explains how Provenir’s unique mobile abattoir allows them to be present on the farms where the animals are raised, ensuring a high level of traceability and connection between farmers and consumers. They also touch on the concept of greenwashing and the challenges faced by processors in implementing more transparent practices. Overall, the conversation emphasizes the importance of knowing where our food comes from and supporting regenerative farming practices.

Key Takeaways

• Provenir’s mobile abattoir allows for complete traceability and transparency in the meat production process, ensuring consumers know exactly where their meat comes from and how it was raised.
• The conventional methods of meat production often prioritize profit and volume over animal welfare and environmental sustainability.
• Grass-fed, grass-finished cattle raised on regenerative farms offer a more ethical and sustainable alternative to feedlot-raised animals.
• Provenir’s proprietary technology, including a unique QR code system, allows consumers to access detailed information about the farm and farmer behind their meat purchase.
• By supporting companies like Provenir, consumers can make a positive impact on the food industry and promote more sustainable and ethical practices.

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TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 – (A): Welcome to the Health from the source podcast, where we’re dedicated to educating people about health, ancestral nose to tail nutrition, regenerative agriculture, and the interplay between environment, health and sustainability.
0:00:12 – (Richard): Welcome back. So this is episode four now where we’re going to be talking to Chris of proven ear and chat a little bit more about that process, some aspects of transparency and sustainability. Obviously, we’ve talked a fair bit about what regenerative agriculture is and how that differs, but there’s a component of really understanding where your food comes from, where you’re sourcing everything. And we’ll learn a little bit more about what provener is doing, because it’s quite phenomenal, the aspect of transparency they have. No one else is doing it in the space.
0:00:42 – (Richard): And so I don’t want to give too much away to start off, I’ll pass it on to Chris and we can dive into a little bit more about that process and understanding where our food comes from. And particularly, we’ll talk a little bit about how that compares to, say, the conventionally raised animals versus what provener is doing and where we’re getting our sourcing for vital origin as well, because it’s a very important process. So, Chris, I’ll pass it on to you, and why don’t you tell us a little bit more about some of your proprietary approaches, particularly around that transparency of sourcing.
0:01:13 – (C): Yeah.
0:01:13 – (Chris): Thanks, Richard. When we started provener, it really was a bit of a game changer. So we were actually changing the entire supply chain of meat production in Australia. So, traditionally, animals were raised on a farm. They were moved to a yard where a processor or an abattoir would purchase the animals, and they’ll be tracked to.
0:01:42 – (C): A abattoir to be processed and converted into meat. Now, through that process, the origin of.
0:01:53 – (Chris): The animal gets lost. A pen of animals can come from an incredible farm that really has amazing environmental stewardship of the land that they have. And that can be right next to a pen of animals that have just been bought and sold and just churned over purely for money, using lots of roundup, what we consider poor farming practices. And so the consumer never knows what’s.
0:02:22 – (C): Coming through from there. So all the butchers, they don’t know that as well.
0:02:28 – (Chris): So in Australia, we have probably the.
0:02:32 – (C): Best animal livestock identification system, which is nlIs. So the traceability of each animal from the farm through the abattoir, is ensured.
0:02:47 – (Chris): To make sure that that animal is.
0:02:50 – (C): Fit for human consumption. What it doesn’t capture is how that animal was raised, what that animal ate, how that animal was handled.
0:03:02 – (Chris): And that’s what we saw was a really big gap in the market.
0:03:06 – (C): And we had the opportunity because we were mobile, because we are mobile. We’re actually on the farm in which those animals are raised.
0:03:18 – (Chris): We actually get to see the farmers, we get to meet the farm managers.
0:03:24 – (C): We can see all of the practices that they have. And we saw that this is what the consumers were wanting. Okay, if I’m buying some meat, what life did this animal have? What farm did it come from?
0:03:39 – (Chris): What animal is it? Is it Angus? Is it Hereford?
0:03:42 – (C): Is it shorthorn?
0:03:44 – (Chris): None of that existed.
0:03:45 – (C): It was just beef.
0:03:47 – (Chris): It could have come from a feedlot. It could have come from the best.
0:03:51 – (C): Regenerative farm, and you wouldn’t know.
0:03:54 – (Chris): So with proven ear, we were like.
0:03:57 – (C): We’Ve got to tell that story because.
0:03:59 – (Chris): We’Re only going to work with the.
0:04:02 – (C): Farmers that align with our view of how regenerative farming can be a key.
0:04:11 – (Chris): Part to the solution of the climate issues that we have. And we can go into a bit more depth around that. So when we were starting the company.
0:04:20 – (C): It was like, how can we let the consumer know exactly where that animal.
0:04:27 – (Chris): Or that piece of meat has originated from? And how can we tell the farmer’s.
0:04:32 – (C): Story in a way that the consumer can validate every single time they buy.
0:04:40 – (Chris): A piece of meat? It’s not a website, so we’ve got some proprietary technology that creates a QR code that is our own identification system for every animal that we process. So when they walk onto the mobile processing unit and we start the processing of the animal, a unique QR code is attached to that individual animal. And as it goes through the process, that QR code is translated into each cut of meat that comes from that animal.
0:05:19 – (Richard): Amazing.
0:05:20 – (Chris): Yeah, it’s really cool. And we were the second company in the world to adopt it, and we’re the only company in the world that still uses it. So, unfortunately, the other company in Sweden closed their doors.
0:05:38 – (C): But for the consumers, every piece of.
0:05:41 – (Chris): Meat has a little QR code. They can use their phone, and on.
0:05:45 – (C): That, we’ll pop up three tabs on the phone.
0:05:50 – (Chris): The first one will tell them what.
0:05:51 – (C): Cut of meat that they have, which.
0:05:54 – (Chris): Even Sherlock Holmes could work that out. Okay, I’ve bought an eye fillet, but it actually tells where in the animal it comes from. So there’s a bit of an education around that. The eye fillet is 0.5% of the animal. Everyone loves eating eye fillet.
0:06:12 – (C): It is the most unsustainable cut that exists on the animal.
0:06:18 – (Chris): But we tell them how to cook it. The next tab will tell about the farm that we’ve processed at and it’ll identify the general location. Western Victoria, northern Victoria, New South Wales, wherever we’re processing.
0:06:31 – (C): And we’ve got a whole story about each of those farmers, which has been.
0:06:37 – (Chris): A bit of a game changer for the farmers as well, because for so.
0:06:41 – (C): Long they’ve been invisible to the end consumer of their know, they might have.
0:06:49 – (Chris): A fantastic story, but Jane in inner.
0:06:54 – (C): City Melbourne would have no idea about.
0:06:58 – (Chris): What those people are doing, but they care about it. So this is a fantastic opportunity that we had about actually connecting farmer and consumer so that they can actually digitally connect through the food that they’re eating as well. So that’s been really exciting to see that evolve. And so many farmers get excited about it. And when we ask them for a profile about their farms, we get thousands of words about, because they’re just so excited to be able to tell their story about what they’re doing and how much they care for the animals and.
0:07:38 – (C): How much they care for the land that they’re on.
0:07:41 – (Richard): Yeah, there’s so much value there. It’s amazing what you’ve been doing. And it ties into our conversation that we had previously around really getting the connection back to our food and our supply chain and farmers. Right. They’re a grossly undervalued part of society. I feel like in Australia, less so. I think we still have a very good grounding basis around supporting farmers here, but definitely in the metropolitan areas, we’ve completely lost that connection with food and land.
0:08:13 – (Richard): And that really comes into the role of a, sustainability and b, health and nutrition, because it starts from the food. And if we’re getting high quality, well sourced food, then that’s going to help the whole society, it’s going to help people’s health, it’s going to help everything overall. So I think it’s fantastic to have that. And now having someone doing this in the space is going to be great. And hopefully we see more people shifting towards caring about the sourcing. And I think we are seeing that happen over time.
0:08:44 – (Richard): Sustainability, ESG, that whole movement is really important now. So having a company such as yourselves starting to do projects like this, where we can really see what farm is coming from, what cattle, what are they doing for their land management is so much value there and it is always how it goes that you can support things with your wallet. Right. So what we pay for is usually where the market goes.
0:09:12 – (Richard): And so hopefully people are caring more about this, are going to start to spend the money towards things that do have that level of transparency, because now you know where it’s coming from, you know the farmers that you’re supporting. And there’s just so much more awareness and improved perspective on the food supply chain from that point of view.
0:09:32 – (Chris): I think the real challenge in the supply chain is with the processes. And a lot of people sort of don’t like using the word processor. It’s because a farmer is out there with their animals, caring for the land and so forth. And then there’s the retailer that actually provides the product.
0:09:55 – (C): And whether it’s meat, bread, fruit or whatever, it’s the processes that have the.
0:10:01 – (Chris): Responsibility of actually continuing the traceability of the product from there. And there’s a lot of tech out there that can enable processes to do.
0:10:15 – (C): That, but there’s a real resistance to doing that because they don’t want the.
0:10:21 – (Chris): Traceability, they want to tell the story of that. And I’m really passionate about processes playing a really important role, because without a.
0:10:32 – (C): Processor, we’re not eating any meat.
0:10:36 – (Chris): There’s just a lot of cows walking around the paddocks. So I think we need to have this, as you were saying, a whole.
0:10:48 – (C): Of supply chain view to ensure that we actually know what we’re eating so that we can differentiate between the products that we want to support and those that are just greenwashing.
0:11:02 – (Chris): A nice picture of a farmer in a paddock with cattle on, walking past them. Does that mean that all the product, actually all of the farms that they.
0:11:13 – (C): Work with are like that, or do.
0:11:16 – (Chris): They work with feedlots, or do they work with high volume commercial operations that.
0:11:22 – (C): Reprehensibly focus on volume and turnover, a profit.
0:11:28 – (Chris): So I think we’re playing a really industry leading role. We’re so small.
0:11:37 – (C): And I have no doubt as to.
0:11:41 – (Chris): Why the rest of the industry hasn’t picked up the technology yet.
0:11:46 – (C): But consumers will drive that.
0:11:49 – (E): Absolutely. Yeah.
0:11:50 – (Richard): The greenwashing thing is important, and for people that maybe haven’t heard that term or unfamiliar with that term, greenwashing is basically using the guise of sustainability and environmental protection in your marketing, when really you’re not really doing anything to support sustainability or regeneration of the land. It’s a fancy thing to use to make your product look better and to sort of coerce people into buying. So that’s this aspect of greenwashing, and it’s around everywhere. And there’s some interesting aspects. We talk about grass fed and really understanding where things are coming from, but even grass fed can be one of these things which is greenwashing, because there’s grass fed and grass finished.
0:12:27 – (Richard): And a lot of cattle are grass fed for the majority of their time on pasture. But then when they go just before slaughter, they’re being grain fed to fatten them up and do all that. But you can still technically label them as grass fed. So there’s all sorts of interesting aspects there, and eggs and chicken are a notorious one for that. There’s a lot free range pasture raised. There’s all sorts of things where there’s greenwashing. And a lot of consumers, unfortunately, don’t really understand the difference between all these nomenclature at all.
0:12:57 – (Richard): So maybe could you share with us a little bit about what is the conventional approach? You’ve mentioned things like sail yards, abattoirs, paint a picture for people. So they get to understand a little bit about why moving away from that conventional processing is important, how that affects the animal, and why what you’re doing and your sourcing is so much better.
0:13:26 – (Chris): Talking about the conventional system, there’s a myriad of different ways that animals are processed from farm through to the eventual cut. So I guess what I’ll talk about is some of the, I guess, worst case scenarios where animals can be raised weaned at a young age, sent to a soil yard, then they go to what’s referred to as a backgrounder. So someone who will purchase the cattle, raise them for a period of time.
0:14:01 – (Chris): All they’re trying to do is get.
0:14:03 – (C): Height on the animal.
0:14:04 – (Chris): They don’t actually care about any weight gain from there. So what they’re doing is just holding them for a period of time, quite often on very poor land. And they’re just actually running the cattle for a period of time such that they get to a certain height and weight, that then they will be sold to a feedlot. Now, feedlots are intensive cattle operations in which animals are held in small confines.
0:14:35 – (Chris): They won’t have access to grass. They’ll generally be housed in high density areas that provided a high energy feed. So what we’re talking about a lot of cereals, they often put a lot of sugars in there. So a lot of waste product from confectionery manufacturers will go in there. So what they’re trying to do is have a high energy, high sugar diet.
0:15:04 – (C): Which will actually make the animal fatten up very quickly from there.
0:15:10 – (Chris): And then what they do is they will continue to grow the animals until.
0:15:17 – (C): They get to a very specific weight.
0:15:19 – (Chris): Now, industry loves that because there’s no variation in the animals. They’re all the same size they’re all the same weight. They’re like. It’s a cookie cutter. Very unnatural, completely unnatural. And these animals are all of the same age. So cattle are actually very complex social animals. They have a hierarchy in there, which.
0:15:44 – (C): Is based on various ages that they have now.
0:15:47 – (Chris): When they take them into a feedlot situation, it’s basically like having a bunch of teenagers locked up in a small pen. So the feedlot industry has done a lot to try and improve the animal welfare conditions. Previously, there was a lot of basically heat stroke. So what happens is on hot days, because they’re eating such high energy foods, animals can actually die because they overheat internally. So if you get a hot day.
0:16:23 – (C): They don’t have the capacity to be able to regulate their body heat.
0:16:30 – (Chris): And then they can have a death rate of around 5% to 7%, which you go, that’s not too high. All of a sudden, start to think.
0:16:40 – (C): Of a 25,000 head feedlot, which there.
0:16:45 – (Chris): Are multiples of them existing. Australia. And then multiply that number by zero.
0:16:50 – (C): Five or zero seven. That’s a lot of dead animals.
0:16:55 – (Richard): Absolutely.
0:16:57 – (Chris): So it’s a very efficient way of being able to grow the animals.
0:17:02 – (C): It’s a very economically lucrative way of being able to, in high volumes, process meat.
0:17:12 – (Chris): I just don’t think it really aligns.
0:17:14 – (C): With most people’s ethical barometer of how an animal should be raised.
0:17:23 – (Chris): Absolutely. That’s the most extreme sort of version of the conventional system. And then there’s a myriad of other systems. Probably we’re at the other extent where there’s no life transport required for the animal.
0:17:43 – (C): The animal will live its life on the farm.
0:17:48 – (Chris): It will be with its mother for an extended period of time.
0:17:52 – (C): It will have an entirely grass fed diet, which these animals are designed to eat. Grass.
0:18:04 – (Richard): Yeah, that’s that aspect we were talking about before, of a ruminant animal versus monogastric and ruminants. Actually, if you feed them things they’re not supposed to eat, they will die.
0:18:15 – (Chris): Yeah, and that’s a real concern in the feedlots as well. They have to have transition feeds. And some farmers will actually start the transition feed while they’re on the farm. And they’ll get a higher price going to the feedlot because the death rate will be lower. These are all the economics that sit behind that. And for us at proven era, I’m a farmer, I’m small scale farmer, run.
0:18:40 – (C): My little herd of cattle. And they will only ever eat grass. That’s what they eat. And they’re designed to eat that bit like humans.
0:18:53 – (Chris): We’re designed to be omnivores, have a.
0:18:56 – (C): Large animal based proportion of our diets.
0:19:01 – (Chris): That’s what they’re designed to do. And they’re a lot healthier from there. So for us in that production system, through the harvest process, which is where we go through the processing of the animal. So from slaughter through to carcass production.
0:19:22 – (C): The organs, we have a very high retention rate of the organ meat.
0:19:29 – (Chris): So there’s legal requirements that a meat.
0:19:34 – (C): Safety inspector has to be on at every abattoir.
0:19:38 – (Chris): And if there’s no safety inspector, the.
0:19:42 – (C): Abattoir is not allowed to operate.
0:19:45 – (Chris): And they are actually there and they do a. I think it’s a 42.
0:19:50 – (C): Point check on every single animal looking.
0:19:53 – (Chris): For disease, infection, ensuring that the animal.
0:19:58 – (C): Is absolutely appropriate for human consumption.
0:20:03 – (Chris): So there’s a lot of laws around that and they’re very strict. And so grass finished cattle have a much better organ retention rate than feedlots. Because the organs basically are trying to.
0:20:21 – (C): Cope with an unnatural diet. And so there’s a very high rate of organ condemnation, which is great for.
0:20:31 – (Richard): Our vital origin brand because obviously we’re getting the organs straight from there. So it’s nice to know that we’re getting some of the highest quality organ meats that we possibly can. And no one else can really match us when it comes to that. But even before we kind of get into that process, you touched on so many interesting aspects of what the, let’s say, worst case scenario of the conventional model looks like. And we talked about the way that the animals are raised. But there’s a whole social component and animal welfare component to that too. A lot of people think of the health of the animal and we need to consider the emotional state and everything else if we’re thinking about how do we be the most sustainable and ethical. And as you said, cows are very social and what they’re put into is just completely contrary to how they’re supposed to live.
0:21:20 – (Richard): And so that whole process, there’s so many steps in there which can create a lot of duress for the animals between being shipped around on trucks all the time, being at the sale yard, being confined at wherever they’re at before they go to the abattoir, even there. There’s so many components of that process that needs to be improved. And of course, industrial era, obviously from an economics perspective, it’s been great.
0:21:47 – (Richard): But we need to start to align ourselves more with nature and think less production efficiency and try to figure out ways where we can have still the support of our nutrition, but still do it in a way that is ethical, sustainable from a larger perspective. And even from the sustainability perspective, we talked about a lot of the regenerative farming, but there’s a lot of these secondary and tertiary effects that people don’t think of. So having to ship things around, having a massive industrial processing facility, a lot of those things are additional carbon footprint, and the same can be said for plant based foods. Right. This is a big thing that people don’t think of. You think of all the toxins that need to be sprayed, all the industrial facilities to process that food, all the tractors required to till the lands, all of those things. So people don’t think a lot of those tertiary effects. So, yeah, we definitely need to look at improving how we approach our food and try to align it more with what nature and ecosystems really brought us to.
0:22:53 – (Richard): I guess that ties back into our first talk about regenerative agriculture. So we don’t need to go too much into that.
0:22:59 – (E): So one thing that I’d like to cover and that I think is good to know, and many people maybe don’t necessarily want to know or not that.
0:23:07 – (Richard): Familiar with the process, but is to.
0:23:09 – (E): Actually go into what the process is actually like on the truck and then on the avatar, and the process of packing down an animal that actually brings food on our table. A lot of people are very disconnected from that, as we’ve said.
0:23:21 – (Richard): So I think it’s good to add.
0:23:23 – (E): To that transparency component and just cover.
0:23:25 – (Richard): What that process looks like, because I.
0:23:26 – (E): Think what you guys are doing are obviously very important, and it adds to the potential quality of the food that we’re getting.
0:23:34 – (Chris): Yeah, it’s one of those questions that I get asked a lot, which is probably not that unusual for the industry that I’m in, but it’s something that people are often almost embarrassed to ask about because they don’t really know how the process goes. So problem is all about traceability.
0:23:57 – (C): So we’re very, I guess, proud to be able to talk about the harvest.
0:24:05 – (Chris): Process that we use. So the whole design of the mobile avatar was principally around two aspects, and those two aspects are animal welfare and.
0:24:19 – (C): Meat quality, and the two are absolutely linked together.
0:24:24 – (Chris): So from an animal welfare perspective, a.
0:24:27 – (C): Lot of people sort of go, yeah.
0:24:30 – (Chris): Well, how can you talk about animal welfare? Because you’re going to slaughter the animal, which we do. But that’s the point when animal welfare is absolutely critical. The end of life process, if that.
0:24:43 – (C): Is done well, it’s not stressful, it.
0:24:48 – (Chris): Honors the animal, and it’s done with the sort of respect that we would like to think that as evolved species, we can harvest food for ourselves in a way that actually aligns with our ethics. So the truck moves from farm to farm. It interlocks with the farmyard, where the cattle are very familiar with going through the yards. They’re with their own herd structure, which is really important, because a great stressor for cattle in particular are when they’re away from their herd structure. So they’ve got friend groups, got quite a well developed social structure.
0:25:30 – (Chris): So being away from their normal surrounds creates stress. So that’s one of the key principles of a mobile abattoir, is that we.
0:25:39 – (C): Actually go to their place of being raised.
0:25:45 – (Chris): So from that point, the farmer will run an individual animal up into the.
0:25:52 – (C): Back of the truck.
0:25:53 – (Chris): There’s a ramp that comes off the side of the truck, and it will go into a purpose built, what’s referred.
0:25:59 – (C): To as a knocking box.
0:26:02 – (Chris): And it looks very much like a standard cattle crush, with a few other elements included in that design to ensure that the animal experiences a minimal amount.
0:26:15 – (C): Of stress and that the process is done very quickly.
0:26:20 – (Chris): So once the animal comes into the knocking box, it’s restrained in five points. So it’s very important that we keep the head still, and then from there, which is unique to our design, we have what’s referred to as belly pads. So these are two hydraulic pads that come up underneath the animal and cradle.
0:26:42 – (C): The belly of the animal.
0:26:44 – (Chris): And that’s based on temple Grandon’s design, who’s been an absolute leader in reengineering avatars such that they aren’t as stressful as what they used to be back in the. Once it’s gone into the knocking box and it’s safely restrained, then the next process. So the slaughter process consists of two key principal parts.
0:27:16 – (C): The first part is to stun, and.
0:27:19 – (Chris): The second part is to stick. So the stun process is, what we use in provena is what’s called a captive bolt. It very much looks like a handgun that you might see on a detective’s movie, but within that pistol, instead of having a projectile, it actually just has.
0:27:42 – (C): A bolt that sits within the shaft.
0:27:46 – (Chris): Of the gun, and it uses a cap or 22 explosive. So there’s no actual projectile on the bullet. It’s just the gunpowder. So when the animals restrained, the person doing the slaughter, which is quite often me, will have to hit the correct point on the animal to ensure that there’s what’s referred to as an irreversible stunning. So what that means is the bolt will go into the frontal cortex of the skull and render the animal unconscious. So the definition of death is actually.
0:28:32 – (C): When the heart stops beating, but at that point they’re effectively brain dead.
0:28:38 – (Chris): So they’ve lost all consciousness and it’s called irreversible. So once that occurs, there won’t be ever any regaining of consciousness. So once we’ve ensured that the animal has been appropriately stunned.
0:28:55 – (C): So there’s a couple of key indicators.
0:28:59 – (Chris): Just to ensure that the animal will not feel any further pain or discomfort, we check on the eye reflex. So if there’s no eye reflex, and then also we remove the tongue out of the side of the mouth. And if they don’t draw the tongue back into their mouth, they’re two key indicators that it’s lost all consciousness.
0:29:23 – (E): If I could interject just there quickly, there’s so many points where it’s very clearly quite a humane process and kind.
0:29:31 – (Richard): Of goes where a lot of people.
0:29:33 – (E): Perhaps have this misconception of how animals are treated. And of course, there has been some of the conventional ways we talked about where maybe they weren’t doing it as well. But this process here, it seems very quick, very painless. As far as animal welfare and ethical perspective, it’s about the best way an animal could go. And prior to that, they lived on the farm, mostly on pasture for that time prior, yeah.
0:30:00 – (Chris): So all on pasture, everything that we do is grass fed, grass finished. We’re out on the farm. We can see that, we know that. And then I guess the stress period of the slaughter process is anywhere between sort of 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Then once the animal is stunned, then we’ll do the stick process, which is inserting a ten inch knife in through.
0:30:31 – (C): The front of the brisket, and that’ll.
0:30:34 – (Chris): Cut the vena cava at the top of the heart, and that will allow.
0:30:39 – (C): The bleed out process to occur from there.
0:30:42 – (Chris): So our process, we get audited three times a year, unannounced audits by the regulators that will come in and watch our stun and stick process.
0:30:56 – (C): And we never had any issues with it. That suggests to us that it’s probably one of the best animal welfare processes.
0:31:09 – (Chris): That they’ve seen from there, and that it ensures that the animal can’t injure itself and that the animal can’t injure any of our workers on the truck as well from there. So once the animal will then bleed out, that’ll take probably another 90 seconds to two minutes. And at that process, the animal is defined as deceased. So once we’ve ensured that the animal has fully bled out. That’s really important from a meat quality perspective. You want the blood out of the animal as quickly as possible, stops any potential internal bleed out or bruising to.
0:31:53 – (C): Occur to the meat.
0:31:55 – (Chris): And once we’ve ensured that, then the knocking box actually opens up into the.
0:32:02 – (C): Truck, where the animal will then be hoisted up.
0:32:08 – (Chris): And at that stage, we do a couple of steps at the front of the animal. So we remove the ears, they’re harvested for dog food, and then we will make an incision along the neck of the animal. And once we have opened that up, then we will harvest the trachea, which again, is a wonderful source of collagen. And it’s also one of the favorites for the dog food as well.
0:32:40 – (E): That ties into that whole nose to tail approach again. Right.
0:32:44 – (Richard): A lot of people don’t realize pretty.
0:32:46 – (E): Much everything gets utilized. Nothing really gets wasted. Although most people only eat meat these days, still, a lot goes into other.
0:32:55 – (Richard): Dog food products or animal food products.
0:32:57 – (E): Goes into leather, goes into collagen, goes into many other types of products. So it’s nothing really that goes to waste, which is excellent.
0:33:06 – (C): Yeah.
0:33:06 – (Chris): And that’s one of the philosophies that we have as well. If we are going to take an animal for us to eat, we believe it’s incumbent on us to use absolutely every part that we can as well. And I think this is probably one of the key points of our harvest process to the very fast industrial avatars.
0:33:31 – (C): Is that every organ is thoroughly checked.
0:33:38 – (Chris): And then straight after that it’s bagged and cryvacked straight away. So a lot of the other organs.
0:33:46 – (C): Are just put down an organ chute.
0:33:48 – (Chris): They’re really not going to be know which one is grain fed, which one is grass fed, as long as it meets the grade, it just goes down the chute. And then I think that’s a real key difference in knowing the source of the organs that comes with vital origins is that it is literally handpicked. And so then we can ensure that it’s cryovac very quickly and then chilled straight away as well. So it doesn’t sit there for an extended period of time, because, as you’re saying before, the organs have so many enzymes in them, they break down very quickly.
0:34:32 – (Chris): So to ensure the preservation of all the nutrient density in there, we’ve sort of set up the process that we can chill them down very quickly and.
0:34:43 – (C): Then take them back to the hub.
0:34:46 – (Chris): Where they’ll be snap frozen before.
0:34:50 – (E): Fantastic point of difference.
0:34:52 – (Richard): Right? No one else can really offer that.
0:34:54 – (E): Usually there’s a bit more time involved in a more, I guess, industrial process between removal to actually getting them packed and frozen. So we’re getting them super fresh, which is amazing. And on top of that, the care that provener is taking in removing a lot of these organs, and also just the fact that we can get them a lot of smaller organs, like you’re saying pancreas and things like that, they’re often not even removed or utilized from the animal, because there is a bit of a process involved with getting them out, because it’s a bit painstaking and it is a bit tricky. So it’s amazing that we have a top quality product and our own supply chain to make sure that we can always offer these to people who are looking for these amazing nutrient dense foods.
0:35:40 – (Chris): And it’s the difference between the business model of proven ear and the larger avatars as well. The avatars basically value about 25% of the animal. So that’s all the sweet cuts that come from there. So it’s all about how quick you can produce those high value cuts. And everything else is just seen as a byproduct, basically, where for us, it’s actually, we sort of flip that on its head and we see the whole animal as the value. So we do. A small fraction of what large avatars.
0:36:21 – (C): Would do in an hour is what.
0:36:23 – (Chris): We would do in a week. But that’s not the purpose. The purpose is to extract as much from the animal and to do it in a way that has the minimal impact on the animal and maximum focus on the meat quality that’s going through from there. Yeah, fantastic.
0:36:45 – (E): That’s why we can say proven air is the most ethical and highest animal welfare, really, of anyone around.
0:36:53 – (Chris): Yeah, we really pride ourselves on that. And the whole focus is around those two sides of the same coin. Animal welfare and meat quality.
0:37:06 – (E): Excellent.
0:37:07 – (Richard): So, quite a process.
0:37:08 – (E): And for people who maybe haven’t been on a farm, or who haven’t been involved with that, it can maybe seem.
0:37:13 – (Richard): A bit graphic, a bit gruesome, but.
0:37:15 – (E): These are things that we’ve done for ages. Again, from that ancestral perspective, we were always hunting and gathering, and these are things that we’ve done forever. And we need to be, I think, more cognizant and aware of where our food comes from, how it gets processed.
0:37:30 – (Richard): Be thankful for it as well, and.
0:37:31 – (E): The people like yourselves that are processing these things. But it’s nice to have that connection improved and give people more education and awareness of where things are coming from. And then, obviously, as we said, we’ve got that whole ethical perspective. So as far as comparison of any other way of processing, again, if we.
0:37:49 – (Richard): Choose to eat meat, which from a nutritional perspective, as we talked about, we.
0:37:54 – (E): Probably, you should be doing, we want to do it in the best way possible. Sounds like you’re definitely doing that.
0:38:00 – (A): Thanks for listening to today’s episode. If you enjoyed the content, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes. And if you’re looking to add in nature’s most nutrientdense foods back into your diet, be sure to check out vitalorgin.com au and use coupon source ten at checkout for an extra 10% off. We’ll see you guys on the next episode.