Meat mincers are now essential tools for most butchers when they wish to chop or mix raw or cooked meat. Originally butchers would use mincing knives to produce minced meats before the meat mincer revolutionised the industry.

Butchers would use either a mincer knife or cleaver to mince the meat. This meant that the production of minced meat was very slow a laborious for the butcher. For centuries this was the way minced meat was produced.

In the nineteenth century German inventor, Karl Drais invented the first meat mixer, which was hand cranked and it forced the meat through a metal plate that had small holes in it. This resulted in long, thin strands of meat.

The way it worked is that the producer or butcher would put the meat into the funnel that topped the mixer. The meat then goes onto a hand cranked screw conveyor that squashes and mixes the meat before pushing it out through those small holes.

In years to come, the meat mincers would become powered by electricity, meaning that the production of minced meat became more efficient. The electric motor powered the screw conveyor rather than being hand cranked. This allowed the meat to be processed faster through the mixer.

In more recent years, the mixer has become more adaptable. By changing the metal plate at the exit of the mincer, the butcher can produce different types of minced or mixed meat. By changing the hole plate, the butcher can, for example, fill sausage casings or produce breadcrumbs and have different thicknesses of minces meat by having different shaped holes.

The meat mincer since its invention has completely changed the industry and can now produce several tonnes of minced meat an hour. This means that meat production has been a highly efficient and lucrative market in the UK.