Bringing the best home

Most of the best meat New Zealand raises never stays here.

We're one of the finest lamb producing countries in the world, and most of the top grade stuff is destined overseas, where it earns the strongest returns. That export success is something to celebrate - it supports farming families, strengthens rural communities and makes a valuable contribution to New Zealand's wider economy. The consequence, however, is that the exceptional quality we're renowned for internationally can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to access here at home.

That's the gap we set out to close, and it starts with the farms we choose to work with.

Leelands, in Southland, is one of them. Marc and Jess have taken on a place that's been in the family for generations, and they raise lamb that turns up on the tables of some of the country's best restaurants. Selling into the big supermarkets is tough for a farm their size. They tend to want only a couple of cuts, which leaves the rest of the animal to deal with, and scaling to the volumes they need is a real stretch. What Marc and Jess care about is farming well and putting out genuinely good food, and it shows.

That's a deliberate choice on our part. We could have gone looking for the cheapest meat around, but cheap tends to show up in the meat itself: more fat, bulked out with added water and salt, padded with fillers that water down the actual meat, and sold under a label that doesn't always tell the full story. It's usually made at enormous scale, and a lot of the cheap stuff, bacon and ham especially, is brought in from overseas, so you rarely know where it came from or who raised it. There's plenty of that already. We'd rather back the smaller local family farms doing it properly.

So we do what we've always done, only with meat. We bring together the steady demand of thousands of households, forecast what we'll need, and use our chilled network to carry Leelands' lamb from the farm to doors around the country, still cold when it arrives. Selling this way lets a small farm do something they usually can't: move more than just the popular cuts, use more of the whole animal, and grow at their own pace rather than someone else's. Since we started working together, their volumes are up by 40%.

For customers, that shows up as lamb raised properly, kept local and fresh, from a farm you can actually name. It isn't the odd-shaped, the leftover or the rejected. It's the same lamb served at places like Huka Lodge, some of the finest in the country, now on your table too.

We're not here to tell anyone how they should shop. Budgets are real, and not everyone has the luxury of weighing up where every dollar goes. But if you like knowing where your food comes from, and you'd rather your money reached a family farm than disappeared into a faceless supply chain, this is simply what good meat costs. We think that's fair, at both ends of it.

That's the whole idea. Everything else we sell is about giving perfectly good food a fair go, and this is about giving perfectly good farmers the same. It's also about access: the kind of lamb that usually heads offshore, or only turns up on a high-end restaurant menu, made easy to get at home. Great Kiwi meat, from a family you can name, on more Kiwi tables.

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