Meat snack company Barbell Foods started because brothers Luke and Rory Rathbone and their mates Tom Hutchison and Matt Laing were sick of eating tinned tuna on their camping trips and they decided to try their hand at making some biltong to snack on instead.
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Fast forward five years and their products are stocked in over 500 stores across Australia, including Harris Farm supermarkets, and they will hit Aldi shelves next week.
Since starting the company in their early 20s, the four friends have dived head first into educating themselves about the meat industry - moving from sourcing the cheapest beef they could find, to organic and regeneratively farmed beef and kangaroo.
Luke Rathbone said biltong was in simple terms, air dried steak.
"You take a cut of steak, marinade it in vinegar, add a few spices and leave it to dry via air flow," Mr Rathbone said.
"Back in the day you would hang it up to dry outside but we now use temperature controlled rooms."
Mr Rathbone and his brother grew up in South Africa, where biltong could be found on just about every street corner.
But despite being familiar with the product, they had no idea how to make it.
"When we got sick of eating canned tuna on camping trips we googled 'how to make Biltong?'"
"Then we started experimenting.
"The first few batches were terrible, they literally went to the dogs."
But eventually they found a recipe they liked and friends began asking them for their biltong.
"Then we started doing some markets and before we knew it, we had started a business," Mr Rathbone said.
"The four of us moved into a house together - we broke all the rules, going into business with your friends and family and working and living together."
When they started out, Mr Rathbone said they knew nothing about the cattle industry.
"We didn't even know there was a difference between grain fed and grass fed, so we were just buying the cheapest meat we could," he said.
Snacking sustainably
But after learning more about the industry, they switched to only sourcing grass fed beef - or so they thought.
"We eventually came to suspect the beef we were getting were not 100 per cent grass fed, the fat was white instead of having a yellow tinge that you usually see with grass fed beef.
"That's when we started looking into other options and we found OBE Organics, Australia's largest organic farming company."
OBE Organic beef is sourced from a collective of farmers in Queensland's channel country, who together graze over eight million hectares, the equivalent area of Tasmania.
Mr Rathbone said sourcing beef from OBE almost sank their business because of the premium price they were paying.
"We were willing to let the business fail rather than run a business that wasn't supporting sustainable farming practices," he said, explaining processing efficiencies eventually allowed them to use the premium product and keep their biltong at competitive prices.
Mr Rathbone said when it came to the livestock industry they had noticed consumers were going on a similar educational journey to the one they had been on themselves.
"Increasingly people want to make sure their purchasing decisions are supporting the right causes," Mr Rathbone said.
One of the causes Barbell Foods have become passionate about is regenerative agriculture, which Mr Rathbone describes as farming that improves the environment, through practices such as rotational grazing.
Barbell Foods have started using regeneratively farmed beef sourced by Provenir, Australia's first mobile abattoir.
Along with Provenir, they have also joined forces with Land to Market Australia, a company which is attempting to establish an objective measure for regeneratively farmed products.
"One of the ways they're doing that is measuring the levels of carbon sequestered in the soil," Mr Rathbone said.
Barbell Foods see their role in promoting regenerative agriculture as educating the end consumer.
"Until consumers start to demand that product (regeneratively farmed) I don't think we will see any changes," he said.
Adding kangaroo to the 'meat stick'
When the Barbell Foods founders visited farms while learning about regenerative agriculture, they noticed something else - the large numbers of kangaroos.
"We thought we're farming cattle but there's all these kangaroos on the landscape as well, why aren't we eating kangaroos?," Mr Rathbone said.
"We started researching the history of eating kangaroos and we found it was only relatively recently that it has come out of fashion."
Once they learned how healthy kangaroo meat was, with around double the amount of iron than beef, they began using kangaroo meat, sourced from Naturally Australian Meat and Game, in their 'meat stick' products.
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