Lee — Founder

The Pork Lab exists because I care deeply about making proper sausage. After nearly forty years in the meat trade, that care has only sharpened. I'm driven by the small details most people never see — how meat feels in the mix, how fat carries flavour, how seasoning settles over time. I grind, blend, taste and adjust until it's right, not because it's efficient, but because it matters.

Sausage, for me, is craft and character in one bite.

Every product I make reflects years of learning, mistakes, and refinement — and a belief that pork, handled with respect and patience, can be something exceptional.

The other thread is history. I didn't grow up with proper pork butchers — they were already gone by then. I discovered them through a long-standing passion for food history: reading about the small curing houses, the regional sausage traditions, the cooked product ranges that once filled a high street counter. The more I understood what that world had been — its craft knowledge, its whole animal ethic, its genuine regional identity — the harder it became to accept that it had simply been allowed to disappear. The Pork Lab is where those two things meet: the craft I've spent forty years developing, and the tradition I believe is worth continuing.

Sausage is where the journey begins — the one product that demands you understand your meat, your fat, your seasoning, and the science holding it all together. But it is only the start. From here: whole animal utilisation, then smoking and curing, then the cooked range that defined the pork butcher's counter. Brawn, faggots, haslet, polony. Products that vanished not because anyone stopped wanting them, but because the people who knew how to make them properly were no longer there. We intend to be.