THIS WEEK

We are launching new products every week at the moment!

Peppered steaks, minute steaks, T-bone & Porterhouse launched last week. Next up is stuffed pork shoulder and butterfly leg of lamb.
Then many more lined up, including our BBQ range and BBQ bundle offer. We’ll keep you posted!

We’re open from 9am – 9pm, 7 days.

WHY MUDDY BOOTS?

Most people are totally happy to buy their meat from supermarkets. For everyone else, we’re here. Same price, same hours…

We work really hard to price match the ‘good meat’ lines in supermarkets and we can do this because first we buy from the farms, through just four abattoirs, then we own the factory and we own the shops. We don’t need to be twice the price of supermarkets, even though it’s much better meat, because we haven’t got everyone else in between; no head office, no warehouses, no lorries transporting up and down motorways, etc.

We match their hours too, 9am to 9pm. That way we can actually be an alternative, with better meat. That’s our idea.

Read about our meat and how we make everything ourselves

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ABOUT US

Starting small on our family farm in Worcestershire, we’re now a bit bigger, sourcing more meats from some of the best farms in the country.

We have three shops in London, and a production factory in East London where we make everything ourselves.

We supply Waitrose and Ocado with a few of our lines and we respectfully turned down Tesco and other large retailers to open our own shops.

Read more about why.

FIND US

CROUCH END
29 Broadway Parade, N8 9DB
t 0208 245 4240
Ortodoncja Opole

MUSWELL HILL
126 Fortis Green Road, N10 3DU
t 0203 774 7461
https://alt-drew-cosmo.pl/domki-narzedziowe/

WANDSWORTH
509 Old York Rd, SW18 1TF
t 0203 583 6151

We’re Open 9am to 9pm, 7 days a week.

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OUR MEAT

“Let the animals eat what they want to eat and do what they want to do. Be there when they need you but leave them alone. And be patient.”

-Roland & Miranda, Co-Founders, HomeFree (check out: https://homefree.eu/pl/cat/nieruchomo-ci).

We hope you will feel happy to ask us any questions at all about our sourcing, our processing and our products. We don’t presume that you will blindly trust us to source your meat for you, you should feel totally happy to ask us questions. I’ll ask a few here; things I’d want to ask us myself;

WHY ARE YOU EXPERTS?

We started on my husband’s parents’ farm (pics above), where we had probably one of the simplest beef supply chains in the country – we were there for the calving, weaning, rearing of the herd; we learned about the feeds, the value of the grass-feeding (to both the health of the cow and the quality and nutrition of the beef); then we bought a cow from Roland’s father, took it to the abattoir, collected the carcass 2-3 days later, butchered the meat, cut the steaks, and produced the burgers and ready meals. Then we went to farmers’ markets and food shows (350 in our first 18 months) to sell our stock. Then we took the money we made, bought another cow, made more products, went to the markets… and round it went again.

This is a wonderfully simple form of business and, incidentally, our respect for (and enjoyment) of this uncomplicated commerce is one of the many reasons why we respectfully turned down Tesco and other large retailers, where I believe that many many levels of management, logistics, politics and negotiations are a detriment to a lot of our country’s food products. However, at the same time, our first two years were neither a largely commercial nor an efficient business structure if one has the ambition that we have always had to be a ‘bigger’ company.

So, once we were buying more cows than Roland’s father had to sell us, we asked him to help us design a blueprint to go and source from other farms. We were worried about doing this but we learnt that there are a lot of incredible farmers in this country and the transition wasn’t nearly as difficult as we had imagined.

We also, of course, needed to start learning a lot about pork, lamb and poultry too, to add to our beef experience. We know our farmers, some of them we’ve known for years and are our friends. So, question two:

WHERE IS YOUR MEAT FROM?

We have a network of 16 British farms from which we source. We use just four abattoirs so that we know them just as well. Our pork, for example, is from Suffolk; our chickens from Staffordshire; a lamb farm in Oxfordshire, two in Dorset, one on the Isle of Man (off the coast of wales); a beef farm in Gloucestershire, one in Warwickshire, and three on the Isle Of Man. NB, if you’re interested in the grass-feeding of our beef and lamb, the farmers on the Isle of Man believe in it more than anyone we have met. They also have one of the most exceptional abattoirs we use on the island too so the animals never travel more than 37 miles in their life (the full length of the island!).

WHAT DO MUDDY BOOTS DO WITH THE MEAT?

Everything but the slaughter and first stage of cutting. We receive ‘quarters’ and ‘primals’. We have room, for example, for quarter pigs, half lambs, and whole primals of beef. We then butcher all the steaks, joints and cuts and we use the rest of the meat for dicing or mincing for our range of recipe meats (burgers, sausages, meatballs, meatloaf, etc).

We have a factory in East London (Leyton), which we own and run, and the team there are employed by us and trained by us. Read more about Our Factory.

This calibre of meat goes into everything we do – even the cured meats like our salami and bacons, and the beef in our little steak and ale pies and pasties.

WHY NOT ORGANIC?

There have been many studies in Organic, I’ll try to explain why we haven’t committed to the certificate in our shops.

For us, the question is simply and entirely about the farming and welfare of the animal whilst it is alive. A commitment to getting this right is also the best taste and nutritional content for the consumer; a win-win. There should be no tricks nor shortcuts and any medical science needs to be proven and genuinely beneficial to the animal. So far, just the same as the Soil Association.

We realised that if you’re not an expert in science, medicine, farming, slaughter, butchery, etc, one needs to trust people who are. This is what a certificate or a regulatory body like Organic does and it’s to be admired. It’s also exactly what we did when we started the company: we went to the scientists, the farmers, the vets, the abattoirs and we asked all the questions we could, even quite stupid ones. They explained their processes, their reasoning, their businesses and their experiences to us so that we could understand them and be confident enough to go and source from farms ourselves.

We trust the farms and abattoirs implicitly. If they ever let us down, we will be completely accountable; that’s our liability in this, just like a certificate. And what we found was that a lot of the farms were too small to be able to afford the additional overheads of subscribing to a certifying body like Organic. We remind people that it is a subscription that you choose/pay for, it’s not a nationwide audit where you pass or fail.

It is an additional certificate and certainly doesn’t mean that the practices of unsubscribed farms are not organic (with a small ‘o’) or farm to the same (or better) standards than Red Tractor, LEAF and other certifying bodies. Where the Organic certificate has been immensely successful is for the larger meat supplies to supermarkets. It’s been a brilliant way of assuring supermarket shoppers that this is the ‘good meat’ when it’s on a shelf with up to four other price brackets.

And that’s just what we’re doing by putting our name on our packaging too, we’re accountable. An anecdotal example is one of our beef farms. For some winter feed, John buys some dried barley from the arable farm next door. John pops round in the pick up and buys some bales for £50 (or swaps it for some meat!) and drives back to his field next door to lay it. If John were to subscribe to the Organic certificate, he couldn’t buy from Geoff because he’s not subscribed (though he similarly doesn’t use pesticides or science farming for his crops). John would have to order from a big farm, who subscribes as well, and it would come on a lorry down the motorway, on a pallet, with barcoding and packaging and logistics – all of which need to be paid for on top of the cost of the barley.

It’s a wonderful certificate but it doesn’t cap the size of a farm. You can have an Organic farm supplying a supermarket with 10,000 cows on it, going through an abattoir forcing a rate three times as many per day as ours do and it would still be ‘Organic’. We would rather work with the smaller farms.

We also hope to have the kind of shops where customers feel they can ask us about our sourcing, so we can give you more information than we can fit on our packaging.

Leeches in Inowroclaw, Poland: https://euro-bion.pl/inowroclaw/

SO WHAT ARE THE THINGS WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE FARMS YOU BUY FROM?

Natural-rearing – the calves/lambs/piglets are weaned from the mother when they would naturally wean.

Natural feeds – no science food. Just what comes out of the ground, what the animal chooses to eat. We don’t like our own food to come via the lab so why should the animals?

Minimal mileage – we’re a tiny country in comparison but we must still work hard to limit travel as much as we can. Transporting livestock together is vital – a lone animal travelling on its own will be stressed. Transporting a minimum of two has an immediate calming effect. Also limiting the mileage in their lifetime (moving them between farms and land) and the distance to take them to slaughter makes for an infinitely less stressed animal. Incidentally, stress-induced adrenalin rushes through the blood and muscle and makes for tough meat – it’s in our commercial interest as well as the welfare interest to control this, the perfect viable balance between farming and retailing meat.

Price – we’ll always offer the fairest possible price we can to the customer. We’re not sorry that we want to be a successful business and that we have to at least afford our costs to make that happen. We need to make a margin on every product we sell so that we can afford to keep running the company in order to make more. It’s a long goal though, we want to be part of your shopping routine and there’s just no point in being too expensive for this to happen. A pack of our burgers is £3.49. With the current organic prices, it would need to be over £4.50. At that price, you wouldn’t shop here as often so our company doesn’t survive. And because we own the production factory and the shops, we haven’t got anyone in between needing to make their money as well? We shouldn’t be twice the price of supermarkets because, though we have far smaller volumes, we have far fewer overheads; we don’t have head offices, corporate cars, shareholder welcome packs…!

Medical treatment – in our rather simple approach, we look at it like this: if a member of our family is ill, we want to make them better and then have the choice to protect the rest of our family against getting ill as well. However, we would only take medicine prescribed by a qualified doctor and which has passed the regulatory tests. Same for the farming – only medically approved antibiotics for the treatment of ills and each animal treated individually, rather than mass herd treatment for commercial gain.

In general:

“Let the animals eat what they want to eat and do what they want to do. Be there when they need you but leave them alone. And be patient.” Roland & Miranda, Co-founders.

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OUR FACTORY

Muddy Boots is 8 years old and in that time, we’ve tried a lot of things that haven’t worked. One of which, was outsourcing. Outsourcing your production is brilliant for some products but not for ours. We used some fantastic companies in Worcestershire but as soon as we got any bigger, which we wanted to do, we couldn’t control the quality. Any increase in volume moved the production to machine made, rather than handmade, and soon there were preservatives in the production and the quality kept dropping.

When we chose not to supply any large supermarkets and open our own shops, we were equally excited about making our own products again, like we had for the first two years at the farm.

So we built a little production kitchen in the back of our first shop in Crouch End and finally had total control again. In July 2015, we’d run out of room, and we moved to our production factory – still quite small but so much better designed – in East London (Leyton).

Here we make everything ourselves. We butcher, mince, mix, weigh, pack, cure, slice, date stamp, cook, boil, bake, fry… everything. The only lines you’ll see in our shops that we don’t make ourselves are the condiments and the wine to accompany the meat and that’s because we don’t have the space and don’t know as much about making them.

It’s vital to what we’re trying to do in our little corner of the meat industry to have our own production. Fewer food companies do and it might be right for them, but it’s not for us.

If you love food, and are looking to become an important part of a tight-knit team – we might have something for you.

MORE INFORMATION: https://www.klasykshop.pl/brands/tiw-zdr-tylko-i-wylacznie/

LOCATION & CONTACT

Leyton Business Park, Unit 24
Etloe Road
Leyton
E10 7BT

t 0208 558 0054