What percentage of the Kobe beef sold in the United States is fake? Answer: 100%. All of the Kobe beef sold in the U.S. is fake – but – how can that be? They sell Kobe beef in spiffy supermarkets and butcher shops all over the U.S., plus it’s on the menus of hundreds of restaurants, including many well-known, high-priced steakhouses. There are 6 restaurants just here in the San Francisco bay area with the word ‘Kobe’ in the name of the restaurant itself. There are over a dozen restaurants just in Berkeley that sell Kobe hamburgers and Kobe hot dogs. Lots of Kobe beef is also sold on the internet. You can buy a ‘Kobe Waygu Beef Extravaganza’ from Amazon. It contains 5.5 pounds of steak and costs $518. The most extravagant thing about this ‘beef extravaganza’ is its price, beacuse it too contains no real Kobe beef. How can all this Kobe beef be fake? The answer is simple: Kobe beef is not sold in the United States.

‘Kobe beef’ is a legally controlled and trademarked name. In order for a steak to be genuine Kobe beef, it must have come from a cow that was raised and slaughtered in Hyogo Prefecture in Japan, where the city of Kobe is located; however, none of the slaughterhouses in Hyogo are approved or inspected by the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture.) As a result, it is illegal to import Kobe beef into the United States. American tourists visiting Japan sometimes try to sneak Kobe beef into the U.S. in their luggage, but it is routinely confiscated by U.S. Customs agents.

Real Kobe beef costs $300 to $500 a pound in Japan. The stuff called ‘Kobe beef’ that you see in U.S. butcher shops usually sells for $30 to $50 a pound. That is a pretty good indication right there that the stuff is fake. Most of the so-called Kobe beef sold in the U.S. is actually Waygu or Angus beef, neither of which costs as much as real Kobe beef. Angus beef typically sells for $7 to $14 a pound. The Japanese government and the producers of Kobe beef have tried for decades to get the U.S. government to crack down on the sale of counterfeit Kobe beef, but to no avail. Nobody knows how much fake Kobe beef is sold in the U.S. The one thing that we know for sure is that no real Kobe beef is sold in the United States.