Buitelaar Group

Buitelaar Group was founded in 1922 in the Netherlands by Adam Buitelaar’s great-grandfather, making the business he now runs as CEO the work of a fifth generation. The company originally dealt in live calf export, with roots that trace back to Castledermot in County Kildare, Ireland, before Adam’s father brought the business to the UK. That generation’s work was recognized with a Queen’s Award to Industry back in the 1970s, a milestone Adam still points to as one of the family’s proudest.

For a long time the business stayed purely on the farming and livestock side. The shift toward meat sales came when the family decided to open an outlet to sell their own product directly, which pulled Buitelaar into slaughtering and deboning as the company moved into the higher-welfare end of the meat industry. Adam has described the reasoning behind that move as a response to inconsistency among competitors’ products, rearing specific breeds, feeding them the same diets, and slaughtering them at the same age, all in pursuit of beef that tastes the same every time.

The business now runs as a fully integrated beef and livestock operation, covering everything from livestock genetics through to retail and extending into ingredients, pet food, raw materials, and a hide and skin division that processes around 300,000 cattle hides and 3.5 million sheepskins a year, much of it sold directly to top brands in Italy and China. The company’s focus today centres on sustainable, higher-welfare British and Irish beef and rosé veal, with Buitelaar describing itself as the UK’s leading integrated beef supply chain.

Growth has continued recently through partnership rather than just organic expansion: in March 2025, Buitelaar acquired a 50% stake in Woolley Brothers, a third-generation, Sheffield-based meat processor capable of handling up to 2,000 cattle a week. Adam has pointed to the cultural fit between the two family businesses as a big part of why the deal worked, alongside the operational benefit of having full transparency across the supply chain, from the birth of an animal through to the final portioned cut. More than a century after that first generation started out in the Netherlands, the company remains family-owned and run, now operating across a network of offices in Europe.