HANNAN Meats in Moira has broken all records at this year's Great Taste Awards, the 'Oscars' of artisan foods across the UK and Ireland.
It scooped 25 awards, totalling 44 gold stars for various meat products, but the absolute star of the show this year was undoubtedly the company's beef products.
Hannan, which employs 40 people, also smashed all previous records by having seven products, all meat, listed by the expert panel of judges in the top three gold star category. And its salt aged Glenarm Shorthorn beef was the first product listed in the prestigious Top 50 Foods.
Hannan has two beef producer group supply chain partners, the Glenarm Shorthorn and the European Angus, producing superbly finished beef animals from around 70 local farmers.
The quality of these beef breed carcases, combined with Hannan Meats' new and innovative Himalayan salt ageing process results in superb eating quality.
The ageing chills at Hannan Meats carefully control temperature and humidity and each contain a wall of 250 million-year-old Himalayan salt which purifies the atmosphere.
The first chamber was commissioned last year and was so successful that a second much larger one, containing 16 tonnes of Himalayan salt ,was completed in April this year.
This is the first time that the salt aged beef has been ready to enter in the Great Taste Awards.
Managing director Peter Hannan said: "Winning so many gold stars is a marvellous endorsement of the quality of meat we product in association with our local farmers.
"We have built up supply chain relationships over a number of years now and the quality of the product speaks for itself when our customers include about 20 great local restaurants, Fortnum & Mason and Mark Hix's restaurants in London and Clodagh McKenna's new restaurant in Blackrock, Dublin.
"The farmers in these producer groups are so dedicated that we know that the resulting products will only go from strength to strength."