QUESTION: What is the most valuable item that can be harvested from beef cattle in Australia? If your answer was eye fillet steak, foetal blood used in the diagnostic and pathology industries or heart valves used in human transplants, you’d be wrong.

Gallstones, found (occasionally) in the gall bladders of cattle during processing for beef, are currently worth up to an eye-watering A$330,000/kg. Compare that with 24K gold, worth a record $131,000/kg in Australia this morning.

Beef Central published this deep dive into the gallstone industry back in 2015, and many of the points raised in that original item are still relevant today.

Back then, best quality gallstones were worth around $20,000/kg – still a considerable amount of money, but representing a 1550 percent increase since then. Two years ago, good gallstones were making $100,000/kg, but the market has simply exploded since 2023.

In fact our original gallstone article, unintentionally, has ‘morphed’ into something of a global marketplace for gallstones, with hundreds of people around the world posting reader comments as potential buyers or sellers. We suspect some of those, at least, may be dodgy, so buyers beware.

So how scarce, or abundant are cattle gallstones, and are processors making a ‘killing’ at producers’ expense?

The Australian cattle industry’s entire production of gallstones each year amounts to only about 200kg, one of the country’s largest brokers in the commodity told Beef Central. The broker asked not to be identified in this report, but was happy to share knowledge and opinion about what’s driving the latest market trend.

The world leader in gallstone production is Brazil, which still only manages to produce 2000kg of stones a year.

An important point is that while the stones (like those pictured above) look like gravel or small rocks, they are surprisingly light in weight. Stones are 75 percent water when first retrieved, and lose much of that weight when they dry out, before sale. Sometimes they grow mould, and become devalued during that process.

Gallstones can form in the gall bladder of cattle, and are retrieved at the abattoir during the bile extraction process on the eviscera table. Their presence, frequency and quality can be influenced by a wide range of factors, such as grazing country type and access to bore water.

Additionally, the supply of gallstones has a lot to do with age at slaughter. A cow slaughter plant targeting manufacturing meat is likely to produce more, and larger stones per head of animals processed than a plant processing yearling MSA grassfed or grainfed.

Are stones lucrative?

So how much are beef processors in Australia making out of harvesting gallstones?

A broker contact who has dealt in gallstones for 40 years made an assessment some years ago based on sales that one processor supplier was taking on average 30,000 head of cattle to generate 1kg of stones. If that figure is accurate, and if it is assumed that every stone is of Grade A quality (which they aren’t), it suggests a return on a per head slaughtered basis of around $10. However, many stones are of inferior quality, so reality may be considerably lower than that – perhaps $5 a head, at best, the broker said.

Another large Queensland plant killing around 200,000 cattle a year (but few if any older cows) told Beef Central it was lucky to produce 1kg of sellable gallstone a year. Even processing plants specialising in cow slaughter for manufacturing beef say the presence of gallstones is ‘very, very low’ relative to the number of cattle killed.

Compare those figures with another co-product item harvested from beef cattle, like Swiss Cut Tongue, for example – popular in Japan and currently worth around $25/kg FOB (as much as $40/kg in Wagyu). At an average sale weight of 1.5kg, that suggests some processors are making anywhere from $37 to $60 a head from tongue offal – suggesting that gallstones are nowhere near as lucrative to processors as they may first seem.

Processors, of course, would argue that any revenue generated from the occasional gallstone is accounted for in the overall price they are prepared to pay for slaughter cattle.

So has the volume of gallstones produced by the Australian processing industry changed much, as the industry has transitioned into younger, heavier cattle – on average at least 12 months younger than a few decades ago?

Surprisingly not, a well known broker said, suggesting volumes had remained reasonably stable over the past 20 or 30 years.

Apart from the Global Financial Crisis period around 1998 when gallstones became almost impossible to sell, prices had growing steadily, rather than exponentially, over many years, until the latest boom, the broker said.

While China remains the primary market for Australian gallstones, other countries like Japan, Korea and Taiwan are also customers.

Gallstones as currency

One theory that has emerged about the current extraordinary prices for stones is that their appeal has transcended their primary use in traditional Asian medicine.

Gallstones have become a form of currency in parts of Asia, it seems.

“The Chinese economy is in a bad state, and wealthy people in China have been buying gallstones and storing them like they would gold,” an Australian broker told Beef Central.

Another factor was that Chinese people are now limited by law to taking no more than $50,000 offshore, the trade contact claimed, so gallstones are being used as a means of cash transfer. Stones bought from Australia are being re-exported and sold out of China, and the resultant cash parked in overseas accounts, it was claimed.

“The risk is that when the market does turn – and bubbles often burst – it could happen with a vengeance,” the broker warned.

With that risk being presented, some Australian gallstone brokers had been forced to change their business models, to avoid being caught with expensive product in a collapsing market.

“The current price is not realistic, and I don’t think it will keep at this level. It’s ridiculous,” the broker said.