HW Greenham and Sons has launched a new brand - Bass Strait Beef – for its Moe works.
The brand is 100pc grassfed and antibiotic free and comes with all the same claims as the company’s well known Cape Grim product.
Greenham general manager, Peter Greenham Jnr, said the sourcing region was the high quality southern areas Bass strait land area - the limestone coast, Gippsland and Tasmania – around the coast line.
Greenham marketing and communications manager, Trevor Fleming, said the brand would be produced out of both the Tasmanian and Gippsland works.
Mr Fleming said it made more sense that the cattle from Victoria and South Australia direct to Moe.
“We will be producing it from both plants under the same grading system - producing a consistent product no matter which factory it was from,” he said.
Mr Greenham said the product for the Bass Strait brand had been developed at the Smithton plant using “tender stretching” of the bodies.
The process elevated the eating quality and provided a more consistent product to restaurants and butchers.
Mr Greenham said the boning room at Moe would be upgraded, following recent upgrades to the chillers.
“The bones of the plant was pretty good,” he said.
Mr Greenham said that as of May the Moe works was processing about 200 bodies a day, and aiming at 300 by August/September and 350-400 by early 2019. Peak capacity would be 500.
Mr Greenham said the company was getting a lot of support from local farmers “seeing the way we do business and liking that”.
He said with the success of its production and marketing of it’s brands that the company was running out of cattle in Tasmania to supply its Smithton works.
Smithton was processing around 500 head a day but “you can’t do any more than that because the cattle numbers just aren’t in Tasmania”, he said..
With the demand from customers the company decided to look for growth and replicating the successful Tasmanian model at Moe.
“We try to link up the breeders and finishers because it’s an important link. If you foster those relationships between breeders and finishers it made the whole supply chain stronger,” Mr Fleming said.
Mr Fleming said staff numbers at Moe would be ramped up from the current just under 100 to about 250.
