How we earn the word “honest”

HonestMeat lists 131 producers and 12 events at the moment, and the number grows every week. Each one is here because it passed the same test. Here is the test.

Who we include

A business is eligible for the directory only if it meets both of these:

• Independence. Independent or family-owned, operating from a real premises — a shop, a farm gate, or an established direct-to-consumer operation. Not a supermarket counter. Not a multi-unit chain, unless it is still family-owned and demonstrably maintains its quality standards.
• At least one quality standard. Q Guild or ACBI membership; Pasture for Life, Soil Association or Irish Organic certification; Bord Bia SBLAS or Origin Green; Farm Retail Association membership; or demonstrable, primary-source evidence of grass-fed, pasture-raised, free-range or high-welfare production.

Who we don’t

• Supermarket butchery counters.
• Large chains that no longer farm or butcher to a real standard.
• Any business sourcing primarily from intensive, factory or feedlot systems.

Where our data comes from

We harvest listing data only from primary sources — the certifying bodies themselves, and the producer’s own published record. The main ones:

• Q Guild of Butchers and the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland
• Pasture for Life, the Soil Association and the Irish Organic Association
• Bord Bia (SBLAS and Origin Green)
• The Farm Retail Association and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust

For events, we confirm every date against the organiser’s own website before it goes live. We never copy dates from aggregators, and we never guess. If we can’t confirm a date, the event waits.

What we never use as a primary source: TripAdvisor, Google reviews, "best of" listicles, AI-generated content from other sites, or social media posts. Every listing carries its sources, with a link, on its own page. Click them.

The rules our researchers follow

• Source first. Every fact traces to a URL. If it isn’t on a source, it isn’t on the page.
• No filler. If we can’t find a real detail, we leave the space empty rather than invent one. An honest blank beats a confident guess.
• Stop on doubt. When something doesn’t add up, we flag it for review instead of papering over it.
• Date everything. Every listing shows when we last checked it. We re-verify on a rolling basis.

Our editorial standards

Every article names its author. Every empirical claim cites a study, an official body, or a named expert, with the full reference at the foot of the piece. Health-adjacent content is written conservatively and updated when the evidence moves. We are advocates for independent producers — that is the whole point of the site — but we do not misrepresent the science to make the case, because we don’t need to.

Corrections

We get things wrong. When we do, we fix it visibly: the correction appears on the page, dated, saying what was wrong and what it should have said. We never quietly edit a mistake out of existence. Honesty has to extend to our own errors, or the name means nothing.

Found something out of date, or know a producer we’ve missed? Tell us or submit a listing.