Jean-François Hocquette holds one of the most senior research ranks in French public science. As Director of Research of Exceptional Class at INRAE, the country’s national institute for agriculture, food and the environment, he has spent his career on a question that sounds simple but has stubbornly resisted easy answers: can the eating quality of beef be predicted before the meat reaches the plate?
After working on muscle biology and metabolism, and subsequently on genomics, two further decades of research on this question have produced what may be his most lasting contribution. Hocquette is one of the principal architects of the Meat 3G system, an international method for predicting beef eating quality that now underpins recommendations from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.
The idea did not originate in Europe. In the 1990s, Australia built the Meat Standards Australia model, known as MSA, to forecast how individual cuts would perform once cooked. It transformed the Australian industry: according to the programme’s 2024-2025 report, MSA generated 409 million Australian dollars in additional value for more than 13,000 farmers, chiefly by bringing price into line with quality.
European researchers believed the same logic could work for their own conditions, but the animals, rearing practices and consumer expectations were different enough to require a new system. The result was 3G, short for Global Guaranteed Grading. Developed with livestock-sector partners, it predicts tenderness, flavour, juiciness and overall liking for the cuts people actually buy, from steak to rib to fillet. The model runs on an international database that combines animal characteristics, carcass traits, ageing time and cooking method.
Hocquette’s part in this was central rather than incidental. An INRAE impact assessment published in 2026 traces the line back to 2007, when he evaluated the Australian model for French use. That work led to the PREDICT-BEEF projects of the early 2010s and, eventually, to a 2015 workshop in Paris. It was Hocquette who brought the Polish Beef Association, Australian scientists and INRAE to the same table – a meeting that produced the International Meat 3G Foundation, founded in Poland in 2017. He sits on its Governing Board today.
The system has since moved well beyond the laboratory. It has been tested in South Africa, South Korea, Japan, the United States, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Poland, and other European countries as part of the European research project INTAQT. Roughly twenty meat companies around the world have shown interest in adopting it. The economics are concrete: INRAE cites estimates of 0.10 to 0.55 euros in added value per kilogram of boneless beef for farmers. In France, the company Beauvallet has built its premium OR ROUGE brand of Limousin beef around the system.
Predicting beef quality is only part of his record. Hocquette is credited with around 300 publications and seven edited books. In a 2014 review, he put forward what would later be called the “One Quality” framework – the argument that food quality should be judged across several dimensions at once, from sensory quality and nutrition to environmental impact and animal welfare, rather than any single attribute. The idea later shaped the EU-funded INTAQT project. He has also entered two of the industry’s fiercest debates, publishing reviews in 2025 on the real environmental footprint of livestock farming and on the sustainability, claims surrounding cultured meat.
His standing in the scientific community matches that output. He is President of the French Association for Animal Production and has spent 25 years serving the European Association of Animal Science, including terms as Vice-President and President of the Cattle Commission. He co-organised the joint EAAP and WAAP congress in Lyon in 2023, attended by more than 2,200 delegates. His honours include the American Society of Animal Science’s Meats Research Award in 2021, the EAAP Distinguished Service Award in 2025 and the American Meat Science Association’s Distinguished Research Award 2026; he is also an elected member of the French Academy of Agriculture.
What makes this career noteworthy is not any single finding but the distance the work has travelled – from one researcher’s expertise on an Australian grading model to an international database, a foundation, and finally a United Nations recommendation. Few pieces of food science make that journey.
