Māori agribusiness creates value for bobby calves, seeks industry support

Miti makes a protein snack from New Zealand grass-fed young beef with honey and touts its business model as one that could deliver more value with less environmental impact.

Miti works with farmers to raise bobby calves to 12 months old then use their meat in Miti snack bars. The dairy sector has been under scrutiny for treatment of bobby calves. Fonterra farmers are now required to ensure that bobby calves should be raised for beef, slaughtered for calf-veal, or for the pet food market.

Miti founder Daniel Carson, who spoke at the recent Beef+Lamb NZ ‘Out the Gate’ conference says right now they cannot take all the calves.

Carson believes that surplus calves mean there’s a need for a better system.

“We need more than just one small company trying to solve it,” he told Rural News.

“Farmers need to start asking industry leaders: what are you doing to protect our social license to operate? Where are the scalable solutions that match the expectations of our markets, our communities, and our future workforce?

“New Zealand farmers have already built a global reputation for quality. The next step is making sure that reputation holds up under scrutiny—and that value flows back to the people doing the work.

“We’re proving there’s a better way, and we’re inviting the rest of the industry to step up and help scale it.”

Miti’s business model partners them with Pāmu and other “forwardthinking” farmers who raise surplus dairy calves through to 10–12 months on pasture. Miti pays these farmers $8/kg for the finished young beef.

He adds that it’s a much stronger return than the traditional path, and one that’s designed to scale sustainably. Farmers are central to this model.

“The premium value we create from the story of New Zealand provenance, animal welfare, and environmental performance is designed to flow back to the people producing it,” says Carson.

Carson says these animals would traditionally be processed at four days old, but they’ve built a system that turns them into high-quality young beef.

“This category of young beef is the production equivalent of lamb—efficient to raise, naturally lean, and ideal for our grass-based systems.

“We’ve had more offers of supply than we can currently use, so we’ve chosen to work with leaders who share our vision from the start.”

Carson has plans to expand the business, pointing out that the global meat snack market is worth $30 billion and growing.

The company is working on new flavour variants, functional snacks for athletes, and developing a scalable value chain for a lean 95CL (chemical lean) beef for global manufacturing companies.

“New Zealand has a clear edge with our production systems—we just need the business models to match. That’s what we’re building,” says Carson.

“Miti started as a way to prove that the red meat system could be fundamentally improved. Our goal wasn’t just to make a snack, it was to demonstrate a new model that could deliver more value with less environmental impact.

“New Zealand farmers have built a powerful legacy around safe, high-quality, grass-fed red meat. That legacy gave us the foundation – and the responsibility – to do more. We wanted to show that with the right approach, we could create something ethical, efficient, and commercially viable. Miti is that idea in action.”