New Zealand's New Fatter, Healthier, Tastier Te Mana Sheep

A decade of intense research and development in New Zealand, involving geneticists, food technologists and more than 50 farmers, has led to a new breed of lamb that is claimed to offer improved health benefits, while retaining excellent flavour. Alan Harman reports.

- Alan Harman

Over the past two decades or so, New Zealand’s sheep farmers have striven to produce ever-leaner lamb, in line with modern health trends. In the past 10 years, however, this approach has been challenged by the Omega Lamb Project, a collaboration between the Headwaters Group (an association of 17 farmers), the Alliance Group (a farmerowned lamb processing and exporting company), and New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI).

The project’s research has shown that in the process of breeding leaner lamb, the flavour of the meat is being lost, as much of lamb’s flavour is contained in the fat. The lack of flavour has thus resulted in consumers turning to pork and chicken.

Using this information, the NZ$25 million (R236 million) project has developed a new class of premium lamb boasting a unique fat profile and billed as the world’s healthiest.

TASTIER, HEALTHIER LAMB

Peter Russell, the Alliance Group’s general manager for marketing, says that by breeding sheep that were healthier and better-adapted to high country environments, it had ended up producing animals with a ‘healthy’ fat profile.

“The happy discovery was these lambs were not just healthier, but also [provided]better eating, due to a new type of intramuscular fat, the healthy polyunsaturated Omega-3 fat. This in turn means the lamb doesn’t taste or cook like any other lamb before it.”