Why we keep buying from Dunleavy

Ask a chef what they want from a meat supplier and very few of them say "the best beef you have". What they say, in one form or another, is: the same thing, every week, at a price I can build a menu on.

That is a harder promise to keep than it sounds.

We buy beef from more than one place, because a range like ours has to cover a lot of different menus: Irish Angus, Uruguayan and Argentine, Wagyu from Canada and Australia. Dunleavy is the one we have bought from longest - six years now - and the reasons are worth setting out, because they are the same reasons you should be asking of us.

Weekly, not occasionally

The single most important thing about the arrangement is its rhythm. Shipments come in every week.

That matters more than it might appear. A supplier who sends a large consignment occasionally is asking you to hold the difference - in your cold store, in your cash, and in the gradual drift of a product that has been sitting somewhere since it left. A weekly shipment means what reaches our butchery on Buskett Road has had the shortest journey the distance allows, and it means our cold store holds working stock rather than a buffer against the next delivery.

For you, the effect is simple. What you ordered last week and what you order next week came off the same line, days apart, not months.

Consistency is the product

A chef cannot put a dish on for a season if the cut changes underneath them. Portion weights drift, yields move, the plate costs something different in November than it did in September, and the dish quietly stops working.

Beef that arrives to the same standard week after week is what lets a kitchen commit. That is what our wholesale customers actually buy from us - not a delivery, but the confidence to print a menu and keep it.

Quality, consistency, value - in that order and all three

Plenty of suppliers will give you two of those. The reason Dunleavy has lasted is that they hold the same three, in the same order, as we do - and six years of buying from the same people is the only honest test of whether that is true. Anyone can hold a standard for a quarter.

Value is the one most often misread. It does not mean cheapest. It means the price makes sense for what turns up, every time, so that the margin you calculated in October is still there in March. A cheaper carcass that yields less, or needs more trimming, or sends you back to the specials board when it is not available, is not value. It is a discount you pay for twice.

What it means at our end

We still break, trim and portion everything in our own butchery here. A good supplier does not remove that work - it makes it predictable. When the raw material arrives to spec, our butchers spend their time cutting to yours rather than compensating for somebody else's.

That is the whole arrangement, really. They are consistent so that we can be, and we are consistent so that you can be.

If you want to talk about what that means for a particular cut or a particular weight, your account manager can take you through it, or start an enquiry and we will call you.