Snake River Farms

Snake River Farms is the consumer brand of a family-owned Idaho beef company that began in American Falls and now runs cattle on family ranches across the Northwest, with its own processing facilities in Idaho and Washington. It has been breeding Wagyu genetics into American cattle since well before most of the industry, and its beef is the American Wagyu that a great many kitchens mean when they write the words on a menu.

The product is an F1 cross, roughly half Japanese Wagyu and half American cattle, and the company says so plainly rather than implying something purer. That matters because the alternative is common: a shop selling a cross while telling a fullblood story. Cattle graze first and are then finished on rations formulated in house, which is where the marbling comes from.

The company grades to a 12-point Beef Marbling Score rather than stopping at USDA, and publishes the ladder on its product pages: Silver at BMS 4 to 5, comparable to USDA Prime; Black at BMS 6 to 8; Gold at BMS 9 to 10; and Gold Plus at BMS 11 to 12. Its beef starts at USDA Prime, which is the top of the American scale, and most of it is marbled beyond what that scale can describe.

That last point is the reason the ladder exists at all. USDA grading was designed for commodity beef and Prime is its ceiling, so a well-marbled Wagyu carcass hits the ceiling early and then has nowhere left to say anything. Borrowing the Japanese BMS numbers is a sensible answer, and notice what the company does not do: it never writes an A5 on American beef, because A and 5 are Japanese grading outcomes for carcasses graded in Japan.

The practical use is on other people's menus. If a steakhouse prints Gold or Gold Plus against a Wagyu cut and names no producer, it is using this company's vocabulary, and you have just identified the beef from a word the menu did not intend as a name.

This is the American producer named most often across the menus verified for this directory, which makes it the single most useful name to recognise. The venues currently citing it are listed on this page.

Two cautions come with that ubiquity. A menu naming this producer has told you the ranch programme and not the grade, so Silver and Gold Plus arrive under the same three words at very different levels of marbling. And a Boise address on any listing, including this directory's own, is a head office rather than a shop; the beef is bought online or eaten out.