NIPPON Meat Packers is the first Australian beef exporter to acknowledge the growing environmental awareness in Japan, recently launching its trailblazing Eco-Beef brand program carrying strong environmental credentials.
Eco-Beef is generated out of the company's 50,000-head Whyalla feedlot near Texas, Qld, and processed at the nearby Oakey Holdings export abattoir.
The new brand was launched to major Japanese customers last year at a major corporate food exhibition. So far, the program has had a fairly low-key launch, being released into several small to mid-scale regional supermarket chains across the country.
Longer-term, however, there is significant growth potential.
Senior manager in Nippon Meat's Fresh Meats Business division, Toru Kurushima, provided some background to the development of Eco-Beef. He said Nippon's Australian operations already carried some of the most advanced individual animal traceability and food safety systems in the world, and the company had started to look for an additional important point of difference to add value to its products in the Japanese market.
The Japanese Government had recently made major policy decisions about moderating greenhouse gas emissions, including cultivating the Eco-leaf food labelling program.
That process encouraged Nippon to examine the prospect of developing the country's first beef product labelled for its ecological credentials.
One aspect that made this easier for the company to achieve was that through its investment in both feedlot and export processing infrastructure in Australia it was able to more easily provide accurate data on which to make CO2 emission and other environmental claims.
The Eco-Beef symbol is being used by Nippon as an over-arching brand program, adding key messages to the company's well-established beef names such as Omugi Gyu (Barley Beef), Olive Beef, CBP and Toowoomba brands.
Asked whether there was an expectation that Eco-Beef might eventually attract a price premium, Mr Kurushima said this was not the major reason the program was developed. Rather, it was about attracting and building consumer loyalty to such a product.
Even though many Japanese consumers were now interested in environmental sustainability, they were not necessarily prepared to pay a significantly higher price.
"The key point of our strategy is that we want to be able to supply a product with a stable price and good continuity of supply, which also carries these good eco credentials."
So is it likely that other beef brands will now emerge in Japan carrying eco-claims? Mr Kurushima thought it was, based on the growing consumer awareness about the topic, and the emissions of agricultural products generally.
At this point, the company did not yet have that information on reductions, and planned to wait until it had access to reliable data on that before starting to promote Eco-Beef more widely.
Nippon has based its CO2 and other calculations on the four key stages in the production cycle: cattle production, lotfeeding, processing and transportation (both within Australia and during export).
In information brochures used to support the packaged product labels, CO2 emission and energy performance for each sector is provided in graph and numeric form. Additional information is also provided on associated initiatives, such as feedlot pen shade, and pen waste composting programs that add to the overall 'green' claims.
In each of the four supply chain phases, effort was being made to reduce the CO2 footprint, in line with the longer-term goal of being able to demonstrate a reduction in that output.
Once the relevant CO2 and energy calculations were made and monitored, the process of Eco-Beef and Eco-leaf labelling did not necessarily add a lot of cost to the business.
It was still too early to consider whether Eco-Beef could be extended into other Nippon beef lines out of Australia, such as grassfed beef processed at the company's Borthwicks Mackay plant. Consistency of product and continuity of supply would be fundamental in any consideration to extend the program beyond its current supply arrangement out of Whyalla.
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