Biwako Food provides stable delivery of various products our customers need besides meat on the bone. There is a limited supply of brand beef and a limited number of distributors, but because of corporate efforts and our collaboration with the meat market, it is possible for us to secure our required quantities of beef.
Of the companies headquartered in Shiga Prefecture, we have the most wholesalers, which means you can be confident of a stable supply.

How we have been evaluating beef for more than 50 years

The only way to hone your evaluation skills is through experience. I would check every day the products I prepared to evaluate the color of the beef, the size of the loins, and every other aspect. Today, I don’t go on the floor to do the cutting work, because my successors and other employees handle that, but it’s true that you can recognize the best parts and the parts that need improvement in the meat you cut by yourself. This is how we evaluate our beef.
For a bidder to identify good beef, we need to face and learn from the beef we buy. Wagyu is a more delicate item, and so we need to continue to work sincerely to hone our evaluating skills.
I started to learn in earnest from my father when I was 18. But all through my elementary and high school days, I would be around the workplace and have a sense of pride in being around the beef. If you ask about my experience, I have more than 50 years of it.
Evaluating beef is not something you can learn by reading a book. It’s all about experience. Today, at the Shiga Meat Center, there are auctions twice a week. Since the center opened in 2007, I have never missed one.

Processing technology by skilled artisans

Beef processing is all done by human hands. A skilled artisan can dress a cow without wasting meat, because the master craftspeople have passed down the correct way of doing things. Biwako Food also focuses on training the next generation of butchers.
How does a customer want the meat prepared? What do we need to do to meet the customer’s needs? The butchers who treat a customer’s vision seriously are the ones who continue to improve.
In the restaurant business today, there is a serious labor shortage. We hear from many people that it is difficult to find artisans who can properly cut beef and butcher a cow. Wagyu is a delicate food. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the same piece of Wagyu cut the wrong way loses half its flavor.
As we opened our new factory. We also made efforts to greatly reduce the amount of time our customers need to spend on processing. We try to prepare the beef so that an amateur will not have trouble cutting it, which helps with our customers’ labor shortage and labor costs.