Britain Used to Have a Butcher

Someone who knew your name. Someone who remembered what your family liked. Someone who could tellyou what to roast on Sunday, what to grill on Saturday, what to buy for children, what to serve to friends, andwhat to avoid because it looked better than it would eat.

That relationship has almost disappeared. Supermarkets made meat convenient, but they also made itanonymous. Online meat delivery made buying easier, but often left the customer alone in front of a longcatalogue, two hundred cuts, a few beautiful photographs, and an “add to basket” button.

We started Private Butcher to bring that relationship back.

Not by rebuilding the old high-street shop. By creating the modern version of it: a private butcher for yourhome, your family, your guests, and the way people buy food today.

This did not begin as a meat delivery idea. It began with a standard.

Not just a meat aisle.
Not a checkout page. A person.

Before Private Butcher, before the UK, and before Karpaty Steaks, there was a simple frustration.

My name is Ivan Zymbytskyi. I am an entrepreneur from Ukraine. For more than a decade, I built companiesfrom scratch. I also cared deeply about sport, health, discipline, and what my family put on the table. Icompleted Ironman 70.3 three times, with a best result of 4:55. Food was never just food to me. It wasenergy, standards, and responsibility.

But in Ukraine, buying proper meat was harder than it should have been. Supermarkets mostly offeredindustrial product. Farmers’ markets took time and gave no stable service. Once, I found a small producerraising free-range cattle. The meat was excellent. When I wanted to order again, I could not do it properly: noclear shop, no reliable delivery, no system, no one to talk to.

The product existed. A decent way to buy it did not.

That experience stayed with me. It showed me that the problem was not only meat quality. The problem wasthe whole system around the product.

A great steak without service is still a poor customer experience. A good farmer without communicationremains hard to trust. A premium product without a relationship becomes just another expensive item on apage.

The idea became clear: combine genuine farm product, excellent service, and a business model builtfor long-term relationships. Not one-off transactions. Relationships.

The customer I could not serve

The customer
I could not serve

Ivan Zymbytskyi, Ironman 70.3.

By early 2022, I had built two successful businesses in Ukraine. The pandemic had already hit them hard. Then the war came.

On 8 February 2022, our son was born. Sixteen days later, on 24 February, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv woke to explosions. The life that had felt stable became uncertain almost overnight.

I had a newborn child, a family to protect, and a business life that no longer worked the way it had before.

I am not telling this for sympathy. I am telling it because the model behind Private Butcher was not born in comfort. It was built under pressure.

When you start again in those conditions, you cannot afford a beautiful theory. You need a model that works in reality.

A model that gives people something useful, earns trust quickly, and keeps customers because the service actually matters.

That is how Karpaty Steaks was built.

It was not built as a cold online meat shop. It was built as a service business around meat. Customers had real managers. They could ask questions. They could get recommendations. They could receive flexible offers that were right for them, not just whatever happened to be promoted on the website that day.

Some customers wanted premium steaks. Some wanted everyday meat for the family. Some wanted a box for guests. Some did not want to choose at all; they wanted someone they trusted to put together the right order.

Then pressure tested the idea

After Karpaty Steaks proved the model in one of the hardest environments imaginable, the question became impossible to ignore:

If a business built on trust, quality, flexible service, and personal communication can grow in wartime Ukraine, why should this kind of service not exist in countries at peace?

The UK was an obvious place to look.

Britain has a deep meat culture: Sunday roasts, steak nights, BBQ, family gatherings, gifts, and weekend tables. It also has strong farms, skilled producers, and restaurant-quality ingredients. But many of those ingredients reach restaurants long before they reach ordinary households in a simple, personal, reliable way.

The market is full of good claims: British sourced, grass-fed, free-range, farm-to-fork, dry-aged, ethical, sustainable. These things matter. But they are no longer enough by themselves.

The bigger question is the one most online butchers do not answer: who is helping the customer choose what is right for their household?

The question that changed the market

To build Private Butcher in Britain, it was not enough to bring a business model from Ukraine. We needed local product authority. Someone who understood food, hospitality, sourcing, suppliers, operations, and the British customer from the inside.

That person was Serg Horobets.

Serg read a post I wrote about the UK market and the opportunity to build a better meat business. His first message was modest: even if not as a formal partner, he could help with storage, logistics, and product sourcing.
Then we started talking. One call became many. The more we spoke, the more obvious the partnership became.
Serg had spent more than twenty years inside British hospitality. He moved from purchasing and kitchen operations into executive chef and group food operations leadership.

He helped launch and operate restaurant concepts including Marketplace, The Social, Cargo, Camino, The Flying Burritos / Wrap It Up, and his own restaurant, Bunno.

For Camino, he travelled to Seville three times to understand regional Spanish cuisine and source authentic products. That detail matters. It shows how he thinks. Product is not something he chooses from a spreadsheet. Product has a source, a story, a standard, and a reason.

He was also one of the early champions of free-range sourcing in London kitchens and received the Good Egg Award at the Houses of Parliament, presented by the late Dame Penelope Keith.

Long before “ethical sourcing” became a common marketing phrase, Serg was already working with free-range chicken, free-range eggs, MSC fish, and better supply standards.

Serg likes to say that a great dish is 90 per cent product and 10 per cent knowing what to do with it.

Private Butcher was created to take responsibility for both.

The missing half of the business

Our partnership works because we are not the same.
Serg is product excellence: sourcing, supplier standards, cuts, breeds, ageing, restaurant-quality ingredients, and the operational discipline needed to protect what goes into the box.

I am service and business excellence: communication, packaging, customer relationships, flexible offers, retention, and the conversational commerce model tested through Karpaty Steaks.

A serious food business needs both.

Product without service becomes hard to buy. Service without product becomes empty marketing. Private Butcher exists where those two standards meet.

Product excellence meets service excellence

Private Butcher is not just an online meat shop.

An online shop shows you products. A private butcher helps you choose. Your private butcher is a real person, not a bot. Someone who can learn your family, your tastes, your budget, your cooking habits, the kind of food your children eat, the cuts you loved last time, and the ones you would rather avoid.

If you are planning a BBQ, we can help you build the box. If you are hosting friends, we can recommend the right cuts. If you want everyday meat for the family, we can keep it practical. If you want a gift, we can help you make it feel considered rather than random.

Not every good decision fits neatly on a product page. That is why we talk to our clients.

The website shows what we offer. Your butcher helps you get what is right for you.

Sometimes that means a seasonal box. Sometimes it means a private recommendation. Sometimes it means an introductory offer so you can try us without making a big commitment. Sometimes it means telling you not to buy the most expensive cut, because another option will suit your dinner better.

The better we know you, the better we can serve you.

What Private Butcher means for you

Private Butcher began because one customer could not find a reliable way to buy the meat he wanted. It survived pressure because people trusted the service. It came to Britain because a chef and food operations specialist answered a message and saw the same opportunity from the product side.

Everything here started with one person writing to another.

Every relationship we build begins the same way.

Send us yours.

This business began with a message

Ivan Zymbytskyi

Founder. Builder of Karpaty Steaks. Three-time Ironman 70.3 finisher.

Serg Horobets

Co-founder. Product lead. Chef and food operations specialist with more than twenty years in British hospitality.

We work with farms and suppliers we trust, and we choose every cut for flavour, consistency and how it cooks at home, not how it looks behind the glass.

The meat we’d happily serve our own family

A real butcher, one message away

Choosing meat online shouldn’t mean working it all out on your own.

Every Personal Butcher completes over 40 hours of training before helping customers: covering cuts, breeds, ageing, cooking methods and how to match the right meat to the occasion, from a Sunday roast to everyday family meals.

Tell us what you’re cooking, how many you’re feeding, what your family enjoys and what you’d rather avoid. We’ll help you choose the right cut, the right amount and something that suits your budget.

Your orders and preferences are saved in your personal profile. The longer you’re with us, the more useful the recommendations become for your taste and your family’s needs.

This isn’t a call centre. You speak to a real person who learns what you like, remembers what matters to your family and helps you choose with confidence.

The Personal Butcher service was built and tested at Karpaty Steaks before coming to the UK.
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1. Restaurant-quality steaks. The kind of steak you’d expect at a serious steakhouse, enjoyed at your own table.

2. Proper farm meat. From small farms. Never factory-farmed. No antibiotics, no hormones. Just room to roam, time to grow, and no shortcuts.

3. Better value than eating out. The same quality you’d pay for in Britain’s best restaurants, at a fraction of the price.

4. A real Personal Butcher. Every customer gets their own butcher: someone who helps you choose, shares practical cooking advice and quickly puts things right if an order ever turns up not quite as expected.

5. Easy from order to table. No more trailing around shops in search of decent meat. Everything arrives vacuum-packed and ready for the freezer. Delivered straight to your door.

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While others are still thinking about it, you're creating a romantic evening to remember.

A wide range of quality meat cuts, delivered in insulated boxes.

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