This weeks episode – putting goat on the menu
In this blog post, you can get an easy roundup about this week’s podcast. Here is everything you need to know about episode 12 – featuring James Whetlor from Cabrito Goat Meat.
James realized that goat meat had the potential when his roast goat leg with lentil Salsa Verde and Chai flowers flew off the menu at the river cottage canteen around eight years ago. Soon after James sold his first kids to one of the great British chefs, Jeremy Lee at Quo Valdez. And since then – his customer base has grown to include more and more award-winning restaurants across London and the country. He wants hundreds of other venues to include goats on the menu. In fact, Cabrito has a global vision to inspire every meat eater from Europe to India and Australia to America to put go on their shopping list at least once a month. But why should we, and why don’t we, do that now? In this fascinating conversation, we explore all things goat. I found this conversation utterly mind-blowing and I very much hope you enjoy it too.
Show notes
00:00:00 Marks introduction to the Humans of Hospitality podcast and Cabrito Goats
00:02:30 James Whetlors childhood in Lyme Regis & Axminster
- 00:07:01 Being a chef, loving the buzz of a busy kitchen
- 00:09:20 “And I couldn’t get away from that idea of really liking that buzzy kitchen feeling. So I moved to London West and friends or working in a pub and got a job as a sort of junior cook when the sort of the sort of position where you’re just, you do what you’re told and you know, and that, and that was great.”
00:09:44 The emergence of the ‘gastro pub’
- 00:11:06 “The democratization of eating out in a way that it stopped being something that upper middle class people did. And it’s something that everybody could do.”
00:13:45 Learning about producers & suppliers
- 00:15:01 “Now your supplier is someone you know on first name terms, you’ve probably been to the farm, you have whatsapp conversations, wouldn’t through the week. I have, you know, all of my, everybody I sell too, I’ve got their mobile phone number and I am, I am the goat man.”
- 00:15:28 “The chefs have much more confidence in where their product’s coming from. They can sing about it on the menus, they can talk to the waiting staff who then pass that message on to the diners. So diners are becoming more educated, they maybe understand a little bit more why it’s 22 pounds and not 16 pounds, you know.”
00:16:22 Brand values and people who care
- 00:22:57 “Well this is the point again, one of the taglines of the podcast is, you know, where we spend our money has an impact on the world we’re going to live in. So, you know, conscious, we spend it, you know, and decide where you’re going to spend it because that is fundamentally what’s gonna support it.”
00:24:57 A little veggie patch, the start of the Caprito journey
- 00:26:59 “They bought the herd, they’d made their first cheese, they were up and running with their goat milk production. And then they look around at the bottom of thought shit, what are we going to do with all these Billy goats?”
00:28:41 Discussing the farming industry & putting Goat on the menu
- 00:32:03 “And I mean, it has felt like introducing a new product and it’s that, no culture or history of it can go in the UK for a thousand years. And the reason for that is really straightforward. It’s the world trade, right?”
00:41:21 Innovation in British food & cooking
00:47:22 Cooking with goat, getting it in recipe books
- 00:47:33 “A good rule of thumb is anything you can do with a lamb you can do with the goat. Right? That then raises the question, why the hell should I buy? Go. But the answer to that I think is that a lot of the, a lot of the, uh, recipes and a lot of the dishes that we consider land dishes would be traditionally go dishes. They just turn up in English cookbooks over the last 30 years.”
00:50:13 Changing the farming the industry
- 00:55:06 Purchasing decisions and changing opinions -“If you can go one person at 50 but the hands up, how many people are here? They can goat’s cheese and everybody puts their hands up and you then say to them, okay, so you’re engaged cheese.”
00:56:29 Facts and figures, how we can change the farming industry ourselves
- 00:56:33 “You can if once a month instead of buying land products, you buy a goat meat product. The whole problem of the Billy goes away because the, the, the meat system is so enormous. I think the meat system in the UK is worth 2.8 billion I think.”
01:04:37 Goat and farming around the world
01:10:12 The ‘pragmatic’ approach – sometimes you have to work with people who don’t share your values
- 01:10:21 “We’re buying their Billy goats, then these animals will still be euthanized. And for me the underlying problem is euthanizing animals. And if we have some commercial partnerships with, with some larger organizations that don’t necessarily share all of our values completely, I can live with that because I’m trying to solve very specific problems.”
01:14:13 Marketing in the industry
- 01:14:51 “I think it’s impossible to start a food business now without unethical slump. I think you need that. I think you think you need it because people respond to it, they need a reason to buy your product and the fact that your product is not destroying the environment or is solving a problem that needs solving like we are.”
01:18:50 Parting thoughts, where to find more information
Want to learn more? Check out Cabrito Goat Meat on:
Instagram: @cabritogoatmeat
Twitter: @cabritogoatmeat
Website: https://cabrito.co.uk/
Click here to listen to the full podcast – we can promise you’ll learn something new.