A recorded interview on Ben Greenfield’s YouTube channel about Piedmontese cattle and a branded product (Monzo). The speakers describe the breed’s history (import/association founded in the mid-1980s), claimed advantages (up to 30% more meat, very lean with high tenderness), academic testing (University of Idaho Warner–Bratzler shear force tests with Dr. Phil Bass), specialized feeding/finishing practices (grass-only system plus protein-rich supplements and ingredients like peas, pressed wine grapes, garbanzos, lentils, barley, oats, carrots, apples, hazelnuts, walnuts), and a direct-to-consumer sales/half-animal reservation model with bespoke feed/customization options.
Chapters
You've got to stop eating red meat. And I mean to tell that to a rancher.
Right.
It's the most stubborn group that there is.
Yeah.
My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a biohacker, celebrity trainer, nutritionist, New York Times best selling author and world renowned speaker. I'm on a constant quest to uncover powerful and practical health hacks to awaken, unlock, and unleash the full potential of the human body, mind and spirit.
So eventually, in their research, you know, try and find healthy red meat, they find Piedmontese, and a lot of them will.
Bring in Piedmontese bulls breed to their existing cowherd and they get a 50, 50 cross that's more lean, more nutrient dense. Yeah. But a lot of them end up becoming full blood Piedmontese seed stock breeders.
Yeah.
And yeah, I mean, that was my grandpa a bit. He had triple bypass. He had a bunch of. Gary. Gary. Yeah. So he had the restaurants and you know, he flipped burgers for 50 years and yeah, I mean, it's a lot of burgers and fries, root beer. But he didn't have any heart issues or arterial issues after he started raising Piedmontese and eating. Yeah, I mean, basically we exclusively ate that beef. And I grew up on the 50, 50 crosses.
Yeah.
This is the first time that there's been a beef label exclusively 100% incredible. There's been ranchers here there that, you know, they have a cull cow or an animal that doesn't fit into the breeding program and they'll harvest it.
Yeah.
But there's never been anything marketed that's 100% peed. Every single animal.
Wow.
So outside of, you know, Italy or maybe a few breeders in Ireland or Denmark.
Yeah.
There just isn't. There's more caviar produced than this beef. When I got back into it with my grandpa, it was to grow the breed. I wanted to see more people raising Piedmontese because they're the most efficient with their resources and they produce 30% more meat. So they're gonna eat less, drink less, and because of their unique genetics, they're gonna produce more muscle fibers, no fat information about the breed just didn't exist. Yeah, Italy had an embargo on the breed 79. And essentially my grandpa learned about them, went up to Canada and started bringing them into the US and within 10 years, he founded the North American Piedmontese association for the U.S. and Canada. So we've been breeding them since the mid-80s. And last year we launched Monzo. Because I really like, during the pandemic, everybody put health at the forefront of everything they were doing. And it was like, oh, we should be eating healthier, we should be taking care of our bodies. And you know, I look at this period in time the same as when Wagyu came in in the late 80s, early 90s, but it was like Kobe, and Kobe was that government sponsored push and Japan just got behind it. This is kind of that same nexus point or inflection point where it's not really been in the popular culture, but we need that flagship product to show people how great it can be.
Going in that polar opposite direction of Wagyu, where, I mean, I literally have samples that had zero detectable fat and yet protein is just as high as chicken.
Yeah, the.
I mean, iron is great, like nothing is compromised. And yet while it's the most lean, the samples we sent to University of Idaho, I've been working with Dr. Phil Bass down there, meat scientist, and we were doing tenderness tests. Warner Brotzler shear force, where you cook the meat and then they have a blade hooked up to a rig that records the psi required to like make a penetrating cut. Continuing cut. Our beef, even overcooked and charred, is twice as tender.
Yeah, I know it is. You send me a couple of cuts and, you know, usually I'll, I'll take a steak up to an, you know, internal temp, you know, 140, 145. I think I pulled yours at like 1:30 or so. And then you texted me afterwards and said you'd pull like 105. I mean, what, it was still fine. It was nice and tender. You know, I smoked it as well for a couple hours. But yeah, when you told me you could pull it at 105 and still get a good tender cut, especially with that amount of leanness, that's pretty impressive.
It's so many combined traits that add up to the meat quality being so high is the biggest detriment to meat quality is stress. And so when they have these built in environmental factors, the sweat glands, the hair follicles.
That's a good point. Yeah. Not just environmental stress related to the way that they're raised, but environmental stress related to weather factors.
We do grass only. And then to meet their protein requirements, which they need 20, 25% more protein in their daily diet than other breeds, I need more muscle production.
Their diet is peas, pressed wine, grapes, garbanzo beans, lentils, barley, oats, and the grass. And then the other things that we identified with an animal nutritionist to work on getting into their diet is carrots, apples, hazelnuts, and Walnuts. Wow.
Where are the ones that are grazing right now? They're in the back.
So there's cattle in the barns right now.
Okay.
We move them in when it starts getting wet. Snowy. Because I built this facility to really be the best living conditions for them. It's not confinement. When cattle are out on pasture and it rains and then there's wind and, you know, the temperature gets low, their feed requirements can triple.
Yeah.
So where they're eating £30 a day.
Right.
I mean, it can go.
They're just. They're just creating heat out of calories.
Yeah. And they're just trying to sustain. The grapes were an interesting find because.
Everything we feed, it had to have a basis in.
Real research. And if you want to find the coolest research on mammals, the dairy industry is such an untapped resource. Fed at, like, one third of their diet. Daily diet. It decreased methane production by 20% in the cattle. So I thought, well, that's kind of. But it also increased the milk quality as well. The nutrients and vitamins and minerals. Yeah. I wanted to work with families. I looked at. Well, originally I thought whole animal for a family, because that's kind of typical.
Yeah.
But when we started finishing the bowls, we were getting 600 to £750, and that's kind of overwhelming for one family.
And more than the average American's freezer can hold.
Yeah. So half animal reservations is kind of what we started pushing.
And we've had a few reservations where athletes put in half a reservation for their family.
Yeah.
And we work with their private chef.
To cut up because you've got, like, NFL football players and, you know, NBA players.
What I love is.
They look at it like it's the highest quality fuel they can put in their body for performance. And when I started talking to athlete chefs, there were guys that they cooked for that totally took red meat out of their diet during training camp and during the season because they didn't want to risk having any GI issues. And they started feeding this to them during training camp. And they were in the gym or on the field 30 minutes later, they felt great to eat more afterwards. And it just. That's kind of thing. Like.
Hugh Jackman talked about eating all the chicken during the Deadpool movie training and leading up to it. And it's like he just had to keep stuffing himself with him. It's like he could actually eat a little bit less overall with this.
Right.
And get the same benefit for better.
So when it. When a consumer goes to your guys's website, do they just, like, select the amount that they want, or do they select the cow that they want? Or how does that work exactly?
Yeah. I mean, most of our sales haven't come from the website. We set up a store in the beginning, and at the time, we were mainly working with personal chefs.
Okay.
And it was like we were starting to dip our toe into working with the actual team chefs for the, like, Broncos and the Chiefs. Right. So people can go on now, just pick out the cuts they want, have it shipped to them.
Got it.
For the half animal, whole animal, there's options where they can pay the deposit, and then I'll get in touch with them to figure out, you know, do you want to come out and pick out your individual animal? Do you want to get involved with customizing their feed? Because depending on what ingredients we use, how long we feed it, you can adjust the nutrition of the meat. You can adjust the flavor of the meat so they could create their own bespoke experience. Wow. And that's. I mean, kind of where a lot of the idea came from was, you know, with Lamborghini, you have. Right. Ad personum program, and you can pick out the color of the stitching and.
Yeah.
All of these different things, but you can make something that's one of one for you.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, you have people that go out and buy an animal, take it back to their farm. They get to choose whether it's a heifer, a bull, cow, a steer. They can choose the breed. They can choose what feed they give it, how much they give it, how long they give it.
What's an example? When it comes to, let's say, I don't know, you were selecting the ratio of carrots, apples, nuts, humus, whatever in the feed. What are you looking at? When someone's customizing, are they analyzing fatty acid content that they would like in certain rat ratios? Is it something else?
It's a little bit of that. Like, from the test groups we've done where we did peas, only peas with grapes, you know, the current formulation.
Research that's already been done, you know, and then there's some anecdotal evidence of, you know, flavor or color. Okay. You know, there has to be a basis in published work that shows that it's nutritionally supportive. From there, we kind of move up to what's the meat tested nutritionally in the paperwork, and then what is the anecdotal evidence for flavor? So we'll adjust concentrations and quantities off of that.
So theoretically, you know, like, if I. If I approached you. And I was like, hey, you know, my, my customers are interested in, like, the Benz blend or whatever, and you had a certain feed and they were selecting based off of that whatever the omega 3 content or the cla content or the amount of fat. You even have, like, a customized blend for a certain consumer base.
