Gundagai Lamb takes road to quality and traceability heights

That's according to Gundagai Lamb CEO Will Barton, who says that as the lamb industry replicates what beef has done before, the sector was making sure to do it at a high level of accuracy and repeatability.

"If you use intramuscular fat as an example, we went from having nothing to having a superior measuring device to beef," he said.

"We don't have marble score, which relies on humans... we've gone straight past that to the only AUSMEAT accredited device, the MEQ Probe.

"Lamb producers can have confidence that when these measures come into place, they're not subject to the same human grading variability that's there in beef."

From the introduction of its value-based lamb grid back in May 2021, Gundagai Lamb has kept reaching new heights.

In late 2022 the processor launched its own in-house scoring system, the GLQ score, which takes into account intramuscular fat, lean meat yield and animal health.

A GLQ Score of 5+ signals that the lamb in question is of the finest quality, with producers paid an 80c per kilogram premium for lamb that makes the cut.

Mr Barton said Gundagai Lamb had been working with MEQ Probe to trial an eye muscle area camera.

"The one thing that we know is important to our customers that's not measured in the GLQ Score is the eye muscle area," he said.

"We're trialling this camera to help us understand and benchmark producers on the eye muscle area... one of the risks is that we might be buying lambs that are the appropriate level of lean, IMF at the right levels and a clean bill of health but then have a little golf ball-sized eye muscle area and that's problematic.

"We know that if we can avoid really small eye muscle areas that we're continuing to drive that consistency in the product offering."

Mr Barton said Gundagai Lamb was also working on getting industry funding to work on a new version of DEXA that could predict eye muscle area.

About three months ago the company launched a traceability platform, which allows customers from across the world to scan a QR code on the packaging to find out more about the origin of the lamb.

Mr Barton said the platform has been launched in the US, Australia, Dubai Hong Kong and Thailand and provided information such as which locations lambs came from on the day of processing, how many of the lambs processed that day achieved a score of GLQ5+ and the packaging date.

"Sometimes in the industry people think if they can't trace each individual lamb then it's not worth doing at all, but what we've done is say 'we can tell you the six farms it came from on that day'," he said.

"Sometimes industry focuses on what they can't do, rather than what they can... we've always wanted to focus on what we can do.

"We hope to be able to send a pin to producers that produced on that day in the future to say "someone scanned product from your day in Hong Kong" so they know where their product may have ended up.

"We're also thinking of other data points to add to share other information with the market as it becomes more sophisticated."

Mr Barton said the fine dining sector in particular was ripe with potential.

"Lamb typically doesn't have the same depth on menus as beef, which makes it easier to call out brands on a beef basis, but branded lamb offerings now have the hard work of trying to change that dynamic," he said.

"We're doing that alongside other quality Australian brands like Kinross Station and Margra Lamb... we're all fighting the good fight for premium Australian lamb in the global marketplace, fighting for menu space and fighting for recognition.

"My hope for industry is that the rest of the industry takes on objective measurements so we end up in a situation where we get the acknowledgement that Australian lamb is the very best lamb, it's premium and that it should be on menus everywhere.

"Australian lamb at the moment is subject to all sorts of variations that aren't measured and wherever that variation exists it makes it really hard to get on menus.

"The progress is certainly there but as more processors bring online the same technology the whole industry will get better and have a better reputation overall."