Where This Started

I grew up in Chinchilla, a small town of around 3,500 people on the Darling Downs in Queensland, Australia  - cropping country, but also known for quality cattle. Back then, butchers and supermarkets were separate worlds, and the range was nothing like today. Our weekly meat shop was a Sunday roast, rump, the occasional ribeye, sausages, and mince. That's just what was normal.

I didn't grow up on a farm, but I wasn't far from it either. My father ran a farm machinery business, and I worked for him during school holidays before starting an apprenticeship in 1986, which I left a few months later for a career in banking. I spent time staying on farms growing up, and the bank put me through genuinely hands-on training courses over the years, plus the odd day of actual farm work. For the next 15 years I worked in rural and regional banking across Queensland, much of it lending to farmers across beef, sheep, crops, and even seafood in Far North Queensland - learning how the industry actually worked from the inside, not just from a desk.

I moved to Hong Kong in the early 2000s. I'd progressed quickly through banking over the years — moving around, taking on new challenges, and getting rewarded with regular promotions for it. But, by that point I could see the higher I climbed, the fewer roles there were and the more people chasing them. Progress was starting to stall, and if I'm honest, so was my enthusiasm for the work. So I joined my wife's family's consumer electronics sourcing business in Hong Kong instead, after we married. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, that business struggled, and we had to find something else.

My wife had spent time in Perth, Australia, with a family involved in abalone diving, and around 2010 we had the chance to start importing abalone into Hong Kong, a popular product here, especially around weddings and Chinese New Year. It was lucrative, but seasonal, and we needed something that could sustain us year-round. So by 2014, we started selling beef.

Our first order was two steaks, sold to a friend. That friend told a few others. We built a WhatsApp network from there, found a supplier we still work with today who does small quantities, cut and packed for us, fresh meat flown in weekly alongside frozen stock, We grew slowly through word of mouth to a solid base of regulars.

That growth plateaued. Word of mouth had taken us a long way, but it wasn't enough on its own to keep growing. In 2025 we built this website. It's been slow as we've never chased the discounts our bigger competitors offer, and we're not going to start. Instead we aim for everyday fair pricing, and we've leaned into knowledge and transparency. That is in helping people actually understand what they're buying, not just selling to them. It's a slower path, but three months after Google verified our listing, enquiries and sales have clearly started picking up. That trend is heading the right way.

About Me

Having lived in Hong Kong for over 20 years, I've always been conscious of how expensive imported meat is here although with rising costs in Australia too, the gap has narrowed more than people expect. I've also always been conscious of consistency. I've seen first-hand how variable retail meat quality can be here, Good one week, mostly gristle the next. So I set a personal standard because of it. I don't always get it right, but I try to be consistent every time.

That's really what The Meat Guy HK is built on. Not perfection, but a genuine effort to source properly, cut properly, and tell you the truth about what you're buying, even when that's a more complicated answer than "it's premium."

📱 Questions about how we source or operate? WhatsApp me directly: +852 9286 9437