The Organic Butchery

When it comes to meat, organic, ethical and sustainable production are my non-negotiables. The Organic Butchery is based near Crewkerne in Somerset and grew out of a West Country farming operation with a much longer agricultural history. The farm was originally owned by Andrew Warren. After his death in 1986, his legacy led to the creation of the A. H. Warren Trust, which continues to invest in rural businesses and agriculture in the area. The farming operation achieved Soil Association organic status in 1999.

Today The Organic Butchery sources organic, grass-fed meat and organic free-range poultry from its own farming network and other suppliers selected to meet its standards. It also sells wild game and sustainably caught fish.

More importantly, I want to know how an animal lived, what it ate, whether it was routinely medicated, whether it could behave naturally and what happened at the end of its life. The Organic Butchery talks openly about those questions rather than presenting meat as an anonymous piece of protein that somehow materialised in a plastic tray.

Its nose-to-tail philosophy is another important part of the business. Instead of concentrating only on the expensive, familiar cuts that supermarkets know they can sell quickly, the butchers actively encourage customers to use more of the animal. If we’re going to kill an animal for food, throwing significant parts of it away because we’ve forgotten how to cook them is extraordinarily wasteful.

This is a proper butcher rather than a small selection of steaks dressed up as a luxury meat box. There is organic beef, lamb, pork, chicken, mutton, duck and turkey, with everything from steaks and roasting joints to mince, sausages and slower-cooking cuts. The range also includes offal, which I particularly like seeing because liver, heart and other traditional cuts have almost disappeared from many people’s diets despite their extraordinary nutrient density.

There are organic bones and ready-made bone broths, organic tallow and fats, burgers, sausages and meat boxes. You can even buy quarter- and half-cow boxes if you have the freezer space and want to buy meat in bulk.

One of my favourite discoveries is the nitrate-free bacon and gammon range. The back bacon, for example, contains just organic pork, organic Demerara sugar and salt. No added artificial nitrates or nitrites and no enormous ingredient list attached to what should fundamentally be a piece of pork. There is nitrate-free turkey bacon too, made from organic turkey with salt, organic sugar and organic herbs and spices.

Wild game includes pheasant, pigeon, partridge and rabbit, while the fish section contains both organic and sustainably caught fish.

Whole animals, different species, bones, fats, organs, slow-cooking cuts and traditional foods, rather than endless packets of ultra-lean chicken breast from unhappy, tormented lives.

Certified organic meat is primarily what I like. Organic livestock farming isn’t simply conventional farming with a nicer feed bag. UK organic standards place requirements around feed, outdoor access, stocking densities, animal welfare and the use of medicines, while restricting routine preventative antibiotic use.

If I’m going to eat an animal, I want that animal to have lived as naturally as reasonably possible. A cow grazing outdoors is fundamentally different from treating cattle as industrial units for converting concentrated feed into kilograms of meat. The Organic Butchery’s beef is sold as organic and 100% grass-fed, and products display both Soil Association and Pasture for Life credentials. I don’t see any logic in raising cattle primarily on grain simply because intensive agriculture has found ways to accelerate production. The Organic Butchery describes its pigs as slow grown to maturity with outdoor access throughout the year, able to run, bask and wallow. These are normal pig behaviours. If the price of very cheap pork is preventing an intelligent animal from doing the things pigs naturally do, I’d rather eat less pork and pay more for it.

The nitrate-free range is another huge positive for me. Processed meat is terrible news for our health. A lot of the “meat is bad for you” talk derives from the heavily processed meat products. It is well known to cause cancer and other bad news in our colon. The Organic Butchery makes bacon using organic pork, sugar and salt rather than adding artificial nitrate curing agents. The company itself discusses the concern around nitrosamine formation from nitrites in processed meats and explains why it chose to remove added nitrates from its bacon.

Then there’s the nose-to-tail approach. Bones become stock and broth. Fat becomes tallow. Offal is sold as food rather than treated as an embarrassing by-product. Cheeks, shin and other less fashionable cuts are actively promoted. This is close to how humans historically ate animals. We didn’t evolve eating skinless chicken breast and fillet steak while throwing away the organs, bones, connective tissue and fat.

I also investigated what customers say when they’re outside the company’s own website. The picture is strong. The Organic Butchery currently has a Trustpilot score of around 4.5 from approximately 500 reviews, with hundreds of reviews posted within the last year. Customers repeatedly praise the flavour and quality of the meat, packaging, customer service and reliability.

For me, the quality of the meat is hugely important for my family. We no longer eat meat everyday. We eat once a week but make it the top quality meat that we can buy. I have purchased from The Organic Butchery for a long time since the Coombe Farm Organic days.

The obvious downside is price. Looking after animals with that level of care and quality cannot be cheap. Organic, grass-fed, slow-grown meat costs substantially more than supermarket meat produced through intensive systems. There’s no clever way around that.

A whole organic chicken, for example, was around £23 when I checked, while premium cuts of organic beef can become expensive very quickly. But I’m increasingly convinced that the answer isn’t to demand that properly raised meat somehow becomes as cheap as industrial meat. It’s to question why industrial meat is so cheap in the first place.

Animals need land. Organic feed costs money. Farmers need paying. Butchers need paying. Slow growth takes time. Higher welfare requires space. If a whole chicken costs less than a takeaway pizza, somebody (usually the poor chicken) further down the chain is absorbing the real cost. I’d rather buy better meat and be more deliberate about how I use it.

The minimum online order is another practical limitation. The current minimum is £50, and free mainland delivery requires a considerably larger order. At present, orders of £125 or more qualify for free standard delivery in most covered UK regions. That makes The Organic Butchery much more practical as a planned freezer order than somewhere to buy two steaks for tonight’s dinner. We usually order once a month and buy the amount we need, which really isn’t a lot. We save them in the freezer and eat them over 4 weeks. That works just fine for us but we’re not heavy meat eaters. I just eat it enough to get my B12 frankly.

There are also some complaints in otherwise very positive independent reviews about courier delays and occasional delivery problems. Because this is fresh meat travelling through a courier network, delays matter considerably more than they would with a bottle of shampoo. The company uses insulated packaging and gel packs designed to maintain safe temperatures and advises allowing up to 48 hours in the event of unexpected delays.

One thing I investigated particularly carefully was slaughter. The Organic Butchery published a detailed clarification in 2026 after customers asked whether describing meat as “pre-stunned” gave enough information. It states that beef, lamb and pork are irreversibly stunned before slaughter and has provided additional information about its slaughter processes.

I respect the company for addressing the question directly. Animal welfare doesn’t magically cease to matter at the farm gate. If I’m going to talk about ethical meat, the final stage of the animal’s life belongs in that conversation too.

The Organic Butchery is Soil Association certified organic, with the underlying farming operation having achieved Soil Association organic status in 1999.

Its organic beef is also marketed as 100% grass-fed, and the company displays Pasture for Life certification on its beef products.

Soil Association certification requires compliance with independently audited organic farming standards, while Pasture for Life certification specifically concerns animals raised on pasture rather than grain-fed systems.

Wild game and sustainably caught fish sit outside the same organic livestock certification framework, so I wouldn’t describe every single item sold on the website as “certified organic”. The distinction is made clearly within the range. Generally speaking, if you’re buying “organic” fish, this can only be farmed fish, as no one can certify a fish from the ocean.

If I’m going to be particular about what I put on my body, I’m going to be even more particular about what I put into it. For meat, that means organic as far as I’m concerned. I want cattle eating grass. I want pigs outdoors doing things pigs actually do. I want poultry raised under meaningful welfare standards. I don’t want routine preventative antibiotics compensating for intensive farming conditions. I don’t want unnecessary additives turning a simple piece of bacon into an ultra-processed ingredient list. I want the animal used properly. I don’t mean to go all “Na’vi” with this but this is truly how I believe. I feel responsibly for the chickens I eat just as much as I feel about my cats and dogs who live with me as part of my home. There is really no difference.

There’s something much more respectful about that relationship with meat than demanding endless trays of identical lean steaks and breasts while the rest of the animal disappears from sight. The Organic Butchery’s nose-to-tail philosophy particularly resonates with me for that reason. Eat the liver. Make broth from the bones. Cook the shin slowly. Use the fat. Learn what to do with the cuts supermarkets have trained us to ignore.

The nitrate-free bacon is my top favourite in their product range. I highly recommend it. If you’re a bacon lover and worried about the nitrates and other chemicals in it, do try this. You won’t go back. Yes it’s all quite expensive compared to your supermarket products but what’s the price tag you would put on your family’s health? I keep repeating, living healthy is expensive business, but being sick is so much more costly to us and to our loved ones. It’s an investment we make on our health.

Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question about meat. Instead of asking “Why is organic meat so expensive?”, the question to ask is “How did we ever make meat this cheap?” An animal has to be born, fed, housed, cared for, given land, grown for months or years, transported, slaughtered, butchered, chilled, packaged and delivered to my door.