Just read that a single beef carcass yields about 450 individual retail cuts. Found that in an old textbook from the 90s in my shop's back office.

2 comments

2 Comments

Four hundred fifty cuts sounds like a lot, but how many of those are just tiny variations on the same thing? A textbook number from the 90s probably counts every little steak and trim piece separately. It's interesting trivia, but the real number that matters is how many main cuts a butcher actually sells. Getting hung up on the exact count seems like splitting hairs, no pun intended.

keith11618d ago

My buddy runs a meat shop and he breaks it down even simpler... he says there's maybe 8 to 10 primal cuts that actually matter for the average customer. Everything else is just trimming or renaming the same piece of meat for different recipes. When I asked him how many cuts he actually stocks on a normal day he said around 30. That 450 number feels like something you'd find in a textbook for a test, not something a working butcher would ever use.