The development of an in-house algorithm to grade carcases has helped Gundagai Meat Processors lift their products to a whole new level.
Over the last two seasons, 300 different producers have consigned to Gundagai Meat Processors' lamb grid, which was first introduced in May 2021.
About 50 per cent of those producers have been regular, returning clients.
When the grid started GMP was offering a 50 cents per kilo premium for intramuscular fat and now they have an 80 cents per kilo premium for lambs graded as GLQ 5+ under their in-house scoring system
CEO Will Barton said the GLQ score, launched in late 2022, encourages above average marbling, discourages overfattening and rewards producers when an animal has a clean bill of health.
"The GLQ Score is made up of three key inputs, the MEQ Probe measures the intramuscular fat or the marbling of the GLQ score, DEXA scan measures the lean meat yield and we've got a program here that we run with Animal Health Australia, Meat & Livestock Australia and MINTRAC called Health for Wealth, which delivers the animal health and carcase defect data," he said.
"It's a combination of all of our objective measurement technology in one score."
Mr Barton said there was a lot of education required to help producers embrace the new metrics.
"The ones who find out that they're producing a lamb that is really well suited to our grid are probably the 50pc that come back and the ones that find they have an animal that's better suited to another market tend not to come back," he said.
The development of the GLQ score has allowed GMP to command a premium for lamb sold through their Gundagai Lamb brand.
Mr Barton said their premium product was doing "exceptionally well", now selling to markets in Dubai, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and the USA.
"The early restaurants that started with us in Australia like Three Blue Ducks, The Stokehouse in Melbourne and Tedesca Osteria in the Mornington Peninsula are all still using the product," he said.
"There's also been a lot of development in Sydney with lots of high end restaurants using the product, which is really nice as well."
The processor also plans to launch a traceability platform in the next six months, to help chefs and consumers to trace the product via a QR code.
"What we've found is there aren't many people who want extreme amounts of detail," Mr Barton said.
"What people do want is the confidence that they're not just being told a marketing story."
Mr Barton said the producer feedback portal had also been highly valuable, allowing producers to get information about carcase quality on the day of processing to then make decisions at a farmgate level.
"We're certainly seeing a shift in ram selection in our producer base so they might still be going to the same seedstock producer but they might be looking at their ASBVs a little bit differently," he said.
"They might be pursuing better growth rates or better yield but instead of doing that at the expense of IMF, the IMF is being maintained.
"Others are actively trying to increase their IMF and as they push for that, they're finding the balance with yield.
"Much more simplistically, producers are starting to learn how their specific lambs behave throughout the seasons on our grid.
"We have some producers that can send us their lambs at six months of age that perform really well on the GLQ score and we have other farmers where their lambs don't develop those traits until nine or 10 months."