Beef bonanza

摘要

Jenny Burt will tell you that working in the meat industry is not something she had a burning ambition to do when she left school. But she has spent all her working life in the meat industry mainly exporting, but in the last five years importing meat. She started off as a secretary for a meat trading company exporting lambs to France and, because she could speak French, soon progressed to become a meat trader before setting up her own company later on. "I always found the export side of the business fascinating and remember the birth of the Common Market," she explains. "The opportunities that brought us meant that the world really was our oyster." Burt's export business continued until it was hit first by the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) crisis and then foot and mouth disease. "We managed to jog along as a business after BSE in 1996 but foot and mouth was really the final nail in our coffin," she says.