John Kelly says whether he has any regrets about starting a business based on selling wallaby meat in Tasmania 30 years ago “depends on the day”.
Co-founder of Lenah Game Meats, a Launceston-based company selling wallaby meat and venison, Mr Kelly says some days he wishes he had stuck with his agricultural career.
But on others, he is happy his chosen path has taken him to places and let him do things he never could have otherwise.
Mr Kelly says the “road” his business has travelled down has smoothed out over time, partly due to increased public acceptance of wallaby meat.
“We spent the first 10 years going to every food fair we could in the state and giving out taste samples, and … hearing people tell us, ‘Ah yuck, you can’t eat that,'” he says.
But persistence has paid off, Mr Kelly explains, pointing to the experience he and partner Katrina had at last year’s agricultural show, AgFest.
“We spent three days virtually in tears, listening to people telling us how much they love our product and what we do, and urging us to keep doing it,” Mr Kelly says.
Where meat and ethics meet
It was in 1993 that Mr Kelly quit his job as an agricultural advisor with a state department to begin his wallaby-meat-based business.
“I decided I was a bit sick of telling other people how to do things, and I wanted to do something for myself,” he says.
The idea for his business came from working with farmer and war veteran Dick Lawrence.
“He was interested in seeing something done with the wallabies and possums he was shooting on his property [as part of a cull], rather than see them go to waste,” Mr Kelly says.
“I decided that fitted in with the ethics of how I wanted to do things, so [along with business plan co-author Sally Bruen] I … set up Lenah.”
Two years later, Mr Kelly’s partner Katrina joined the company, driven to see it succeed by “slightly different” motivations to Mr Kelly.
“We often joke to each other that John’s a bit of a frustrated agriculturalist, and I’m a bit of a frustrated greenie,” Ms Kelly says.
“John’s more from a … meat science and agricultural background, whereas my passions are ethics and the environment.”
Mr Kelly says his enthusiasm for wallaby meat stems from its “beautiful meat science credentials”; specifically, its sweetness, tenderness and long shelf life.
“[And] in terms of food production, from an animal welfare and from an environmental angle, you really can’t get much better than wild harvested animals,” Ms Kelly said.
Where does the meat come from?
The business sources its meat from Bennetts wallabies, which are native to Tasmania.
Increased pasture production by farms has caused wallaby numbers to explode, Mr Kelly says, with Tasmania now home to about 3 million Bennetts wallabies.
“They compete with sheep and cattle for pastures, and they can graze fairly heavily on expensive crops,” he says.
Due to the damage to farms they cause, about half a million Bennetts wallabies are culled under state government-issued crop protection permits each year, Mr Kelly explains.
“There is a large-scale cull of wallabies in Tasmania every year [and] there has been for 50 years.”
Mr Kelly says the state government has a highly developed system to monitor the health of the Bennetts wallaby population.
And according to its data, the Bennetts wallaby population in Tasmania has been increasing consistently for the past 50 years, in spite of the annual cull.
“What we do [as a business] is turn part of that cull into a commercial harvest, to see [the wallabies] utilised, and to see them generate jobs,” Mr Kelly says.
Selling ‘pet food’ to people
Mr Kelly says one of the biggest hurdles faced by the business, particularly at the start, was changing public attitudes towards wallaby meat.
“The product we were selling, as far as Tasmanians were concerned, was called ‘roo’ and it was [only] good for pet food and maybe patties,” he says.
Local people had been exposed to “a century of anglicised looking-down-the-nose at anything native,” Mr Kelly says, which kept wallaby well and truly off the menu.
“People just weren’t interested in eating it,” co-founder Sally Bruen says.
So, after “extensive market research” indicated a different product name was in order, Mr Kelly says they decided to run with “wallaby” rather than “roo”.
“And we started producing it in portioned, aged, trimmed cuts, to make it as easy for chefs to use as possible,” he says.
Many years of sticking with that approach, and turning up at food fairs finally paid off, Ms Bruen says.
“Wallaby meat is now an accepted part of the Tasmanian fine food basket, with many people liking it for what it is, a damn good meat,” Mr Kelly says.
Others though, buy it because they support the production of food from “animals that belong” in this country, as opposed to “hard-hoofed exotic animals” like beef and sheep, he explained.
“People now understand the value of eating wild meat,” Ms Bruen says.
Mr Kelly says the type of people consuming wallaby meat has changed “considerably” over time, along with the places they purchase it.
When they first started the business, he says, their target consumers were “older … adventurous diners”, and they were selling their meat only into restaurants.
“Now if we do a food fair, we get 16-year-old girls making a beeline out of the crowd,” Mr Kelly says, and their meat is sold in more than 300 supermarkets, health food stores and restaurants across the country.
“We [also now] have people who describe themselves as ‘wallatarians’.
“People who make the choice that the only red meat they eat will be wallaby, based on all the ethics behind it.”
A spokesperson for the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia says kangaroo meat, including wallaby meat, is one of the “healthiest and most sustainable red meats in the world”.
“Commercial harvesting of kangaroos is widely considered by the scientific community, government, animal welfare experts, Indigenous groups, and the agricultural industry as a responsible way to manage kangaroo numbers while boosting the economy,” they say.
Finding uses for wallaby fur
Mr Kelly says while he and Ms Kelly now consider themselves “really good” at selling wallaby meat, wallaby skins is something they are still working on.
“Selling the skins has been the toughest part of the job, all the way through,” he says.
At one stage, Mr Kelly says, his business was selling wallaby skins to a company in Turkey, which was turning them into fur coats for Russians, a supply chain that did not last long.
“So we’ve tried all sorts of things and never really been able to find a market that would take all of our skin products,” he says.
“And we have been sending those products to landfill [which] really breaks our heart.”
The company’s latest attempt to sell skins is ugg boots made from wallaby skin called Wuggs, a product that has been in the making for 10 years.
Mr Kelly says after an eight-year hiatus, he and Ms Kelly returned their focus to Wuggs.
“During COVID, when internet shopping really did start taking off, we came back to it,” he says.
“We’ve really only just started trying to promote them quite aggressively this year.”
Mr Kelly hopes it signals a change in direction for their company.
“If we were able to sell all of our wallaby skins as Wuggs, it … would turn us into a fashion company rather than a meat company,” Mr Kelly says.
“It’s going to take a little while to get there but … I’d love us to do that.”
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