The history of the BBQ.PL store

Passion and experience you can trust

We are a team of enthusiasts and specialists in premium meats, such as beef and lamb. Thanks to the BBQ.PL online store, after 30 years of existence of our company Tender Meat sp. z o.o. on the gastronomic market and on the delicatessen market, for the first time we have the opportunity to reach with our offer directly to great people who appreciate the highest quality meat and love to grill just like us.

We have always said that in food it is not the quantity that counts, but the quality. Eating is a great pleasure if we have good products at our disposal. But it should be remembered that in addition to pleasure, what we eat has a direct impact on our health. Saving today on products at the expense of their quality, we have to reckon with more expenses for medicines in the future 😊.

It is also important that we must be responsible inhabitants of our planet and we should be aware of such factors related to meat production as, above all, animal welfare or the impact of production on the natural environment. We place great emphasis on this. We try to work only with responsible producers who are subject to the guidelines of sustainable agricultural production, guaranteeing a decent life for farm animals and care for the natural environment.

BBQ.PL is our "youngest child". Through the online butcher shop, our dream of creating a place where you can order meat of the highest quality at any time of the day or night and get it perfectly secured at the door of your own home has come true. It is a great pleasure and responsibility for us at the same time. We try to share our many years of experience and passion as best we can. We can't disappoint your trust, because at the end of the day, your opinion is the most important thing.

Because everyone has different culinary tastes and their favorite flavors, in our store we try to offer a variety of products in various respects: country of origin, length of seasoning, thickness of steaks, variety of steak elements, level of marbling, etc., so that each of you can choose exactly the meat, which he just wants. We try to make our offer as flexible as possible, but we never compromise when it comes to quality. All products offered in our store are of very high quality to ensure your culinary satisfaction every time you place an order with us.

It all started with pork

But back to our story. We are a small family company on the market for over 30 years. The company was founded by a pair of IT specialists Alicja Wierzbicka and Jerzy Wierzbicki, who in the early 90s wanted to leave computers and deal with the meat trade. It started with pork, the first butcher shops appeared in the small town of Płońsk, about 60 km from Warsaw. Later, there was a small slaughterhouse and the production of various pork products such as homemade cold cuts, sausages, black puddings and other delicacies to supply the aforementioned butcher shops. At the same time, international trade developed, mainly based on the export and import of beef and pork offal.

The birth of a passion for beef

In the 1990s, culinary beef was not popular in Poland, it can be safely said that there was no such meat in our country at that time. The production of native beef was based on "waste" from milk production. Dairy cattle, which ceased to be efficient, were sent to the slaughterhouse and such beef was sent to the consumer market. That is why Poles did not like beef meat, which was lean, hard and, apart from the option of stewing or cooking, practically was not suitable for anything else.

While trading in offal, the founders of our company began to visit countries where beef production had been taking place for generations based on beef cattle breeds intended for obtaining high-quality culinary beef. Americans infected us with real love for beef. The fascination with high-quality beef was born during the first trips to the USA. The BBQ culture, the celebration of grilling together with friends and family inspired us to start importing such meat to Poland. We found our niche.

Premium beef was loved by Polish gastronomy

Culinary beef was loved by Polish gastronomy. At that time, Polish beef was several times cheaper than beef from Western Europe, not to mention beef from the USA. However, the chefs soon found out that preparing beef is trivial if they have at their disposal raw material of high, repeatable quality and sales, despite the higher price, began to grow rapidly. Earlier, only beef tenderloin reigned in Polish restaurants, because it was the only beef element suitable for steaks. Chefs quickly began to discover that you can make great steaks from entrecote, roast beef, candle beef, mint, shoulder

American beef, through its highly reproducible quality, has particularly charmed chefs. Every time they ordered a given steak or item it had exactly the same quality. Until now, they had been accustomed to a total lottery when it came to the level of meat quality, with the loser pointing to a concrete-hard piece of beef. In response to such high market interest in reproducible quality beef, we have expanded the product line to include beef from other countries known for premium beef such as Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, England, Australia, Scotland, Ireland and Japan.

Along with introducing new products, we focused on educating and training about premium beef. The current icons of Polish gastronomy, in terms of beef knowledge, at the beginning of their culinary careers took part in trips to the US organized by our company. They learned the techniques and secrets of grilling where the world's heart of barbecue and BBQ art beats. In the years that followed, we organized numerous training courses and workshops in Poland, sharing the experience we gathered, of which we managed to gain quite a lot over the years.

Over the years, our product range has naturally expanded to include other meats. In particular, about lamb, venison, premium poultry or exotic meats. However, we have always focused on ensuring that the products we supply are of the highest quality.

Polish quality beef

The owners of our company, however, had a certain shortfall. Since they were able to import delicious culinary beef from abroad, they set themselves the goal of bringing about the production facilities for Polish culinary beef. After all, Poland has excellent natural conditions and fantastic farmers who could learn to produce such beef. That's when the Polish Beef Cattle Producers Association was formed, headed by premium beef experts including one of our company's founders and PZPBM President Jerzy Wierzbicki. The key to premium beef production is precisely the production of quality livestock. It's about the right breeds of cattle and how they are raised (welfare, nutrition, etc.). A group of enthusiasts, experts, scientists, representatives of meat processing plants and agricultural producers worked hard for many years to create Poland's first national food quality system with production standards that guarantee the reproducible high quality of QMP (Quality Meat Program) beef. Today, Polish beef has fantastic quality and is valued for it on foreign markets and, of course, in Poland by both consumers and caterers.