Wagyu is widely regarded as the world’s most luxurious—and costly—beef. More than just a cut of meat, it has become a culinary icon: a Japanese breed so prized that its life is often described as one of pampering and privilege.
Stories of Wagyu cattle being massaged to relax their muscles are familiar. So are accounts of classical music, sometimes even Puccini, playing in specially designed barns as the animals rest. Their rich diets may include corn, barley and rice grass, occasionally accompanied by beer or sake.
The purpose of all this care, however, is ultimately very practical: to produce beef with such extraordinary fat content and texture that it softens almost instantly in the mouth, with the richness of butter.
But can even the most exceptional steak truly justify a price of £100 for 100g—the equivalent of roughly two Snickers bars? And if premium Wagyu costs so much, why has it become a headline ingredient in fast-food burgers? More puzzling still, why are supermarkets and High Street retailers selling supposedly Wagyu products for a fraction of the price?
Consumers now have plenty of choices, including M&S British Wagyu Beef Burgers at £6 and Waitrose Wagyu Beef Meatballs for £5.25. Aldi’s Specially Selected range has also featured an 8oz Premium Wagyu Flat Iron steak priced at £6.99. Burger King, meanwhile, launched a Wagyu burger backed by Gordon Ramsay for approximately £10.99.
It can all seem like the ultimate victory of branding over logic—a Japanese label transformed into shorthand for “you saw me coming.”
The surge in Wagyu products is partly explained by the name’s powerful association with premium meat and exclusivity. Yet an important question remains: is every product labelled Wagyu genuinely comparable?
As with many luxury food trends, the reality is often buried beneath layers of advertising, folklore and potentially misleading claims.
Wagyu, considered some of the world’s finest and most expensive beef, is prized for its extraordinary richness and butter-soft texture
The low prices of High Street Wagyu products raise questions about what is actually being sold; Burger King’s Wagyu burger was priced at £10.99
Wagyu translates as ‘Japanese cow’ and covers four native breeds raised in Japan, with Japanese Black the most famous and widely bred
The story begins with the name itself. Wagyu means “Japanese cow” and refers to four indigenous Japanese breeds that are born, raised and finished in the country. While all four are highly regarded, Japanese Black dominates the industry, representing 97 per cent of Wagyu cattle raised in Japan.
Japanese Black is celebrated for its intense flavour, delicate texture and remarkable network of intramuscular fat. Within the Wagyu world, it is considered the undisputed heavyweight.
These cattle were not originally developed as a source of food. They were valued for their strength and stamina, helping farmers work rice paddies, pull carts and navigate difficult mountain landscapes. In effect, they were the agricultural machinery of their time—and far too valuable to slaughter. Eating meat was also discouraged in a largely Buddhist society.
Wagyu cattle also remained unusually genetically pure. During the Edo period, from 1603 to 1868, Japan followed sakoku, a policy of national isolation that sharply limited contact with other countries. This allowed the cattle to develop with little outside influence. Their natural tendency towards heavy marbling, tenderness and distinctive flavour was preserved and strengthened over successive generations.
That isolation ended in 1853, when Japan was pressured to reopen its borders. Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the country also abandoned its long-standing cultural taboo around meat consumption.
The government then promoted selective crossbreeding between Wagyu and Western cattle in an effort to produce larger animals that grew faster and yielded more meat. Crossbreeding was halted in 1910 after concerns that it was diluting the cattle’s distinctive qualities. Over time, an animal once valued primarily for labour had become the foundation of one of the world’s most sought-after foods.
“Japanese Wagyu is different from the very first look,” says Hisato Hamada, chef and co-founder of Wagyumafia, which operates 24 restaurants internationally. A committed Wagyu expert, Hamada sources cattle from leading farms producing Kobe and Ozaki beef.
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Like the finest Wagyu producers in Japan, Hamada’s beef carries an A5 grade—the top classification and the one associated with the highest prices. Raising cattle to meet that standard demands considerable time, expertise and painstaking care.
The Japanese Meat Grading Association oversees the system used to maintain those standards. Carcass yield is rated from A to C, while meat quality is scored from one to five according to factors including marbling, colour and brightness, firmness, texture, and the colour and quality of the fat.
Great Wagyu always starts with the finest genetics, and bloodlines are everything. Feeding is every bit as important, starting, as calves, on grass, before moving to a highly specialised grain-based diet. The key is a slow, steady fat accumulation.
‘I think a lot of supermarket Wagyu is a bit of a gimmick,’ says Elliott Grover, culinary director at Cut by Wolfgang Puck, at 45 Park Lane – one of London’s best places to try Wagyu. ‘Just because something has Wagyu written on the packaging doesn’t automatically mean it’s exceptional beef. A lot of these products are crossbred cattle. It’s very different from genuine Japanese A5 Wagyu.’
Wagyumafia, founded by Hisato Hamada, serves expensive, gold-standard Wagyu beef, due to the effort that goes into raising their cows. (Pictured: The restaurant’s cutlet sandwich)
The quality of the meat is scored from one to five by the Japanese Meat Grading Association, based on factors like marbling and texture. The meat-to-carcass yield is graded from A to C
He explains that genetic mixing between Wagyu breeds and domestic cattle reduces the expense of the meat, as does raising the cows locally, thereby slashing transport costs from Japan. Supermarkets do not need to sell A5-quality beef to call it Wagyu.
He has a particular problem with the burgers: ‘Once you’ve minced the beef, I think you’re losing much of what makes Wagyu so special in the first place.’
The quality – and price of the meat – will also rely on how the cow has been raised.
A few years back, I visited a Wagyu farm just outside Kobe, the capital city of Hyogo prefecture, home of the famed Kobe beef.
‘Kobe Beef is defined by being limited strictly to pure Tajima cattle,’ says chef Mr Hamada, ‘with rigorous control of quality, individual animals and bloodlines. It comes from just a relatively small number of farms in Hyogo prefecture and carries a regional Geographical Indication.’
All Kobe beef is Wagyu, but not all Wagyu is Kobe. It’s rather like champagne and sparkling wine. Same process, same product but only wine produced exclusively in the Champagne region of north-east France can bear that name. The same goes for Kobe beef.
The area is lushly green, filled with forests, and rolling, mist-wisped hills. Calves forage in the pastures while older cows lounge about in vast, open-sided barns. Opera plays from the speakers. ‘They like it,’ says the farmer. ‘It keeps them calm and happy.’
They’re certainly laidback, lounging indolently on the soft soil, horned, compact, with a deep black coat. Stress is very much the enemy, releasing hormones which not only taint the meat but hinder intramuscular marbling. Which is why some farmers may brush their cows, even massage them. But it’s not standard practice, just as feeding them beer and sake is more myth than reality.
After our trip around the farm, we break for lunch, at a traditional Wagyu restaurant, to try the beef. The meat is astonishingly marbled, beautifully intricate rivulets of fat running through the flesh like alabaster flurries. We eat it sliced into tissue paper-thin ribbons, shabu shabu-style, simmered briefly in bubbling stock. Next, small lozenges of sirloin, cooked over charcoal, the texture more like foie gras than beef.
Black cattle can be raised all over the world, as Hamada says: ‘You can taste the land, the climate and the way they’re raised. Seeing Japanese cattle thrive in new places is a good thing, much like how wine spread around the world.’
And yet while Burger King’s offerings may well be ‘100 per cent Wagyu beef, sourced from crossbred herds on local UK farms’, it’s dry, bland and deeply boring, little more than a cynical gimmick. If that’s true Wagyu, then I’m Kate Moss.