Value adding goatmeat for domestic consumers – a $13M opportunity

A feasibility study has been undertaken in the Australian domestic market looking at new usages, occasions and opportunity spaces for goatmeat.

The opportunities identified have been valued at approximately $13 million per year and MLA Donor Company is now seeking co-funding partners within the industry to act on these findings.

The project, value adding goatmeat for domestic consumers, used a design led thinking approach (keeping the customer front of mind) and held interviews to capture the perspectives of producers, supply chain intermediaries, butchers and key end users.

In the last 20 years, several secondary proteins have risen to prominence beyond the restaurant scene to become mainstays of supermarket offerings, where most Australians buy their meat. This includes fresh seafood (such as salmon and tuna), duck, kangaroo, turkey, mussels and venison.

There are lessons from the success of secondary proteins that goatmeat could learn from and adapt to grow demand while remaining true to the product’s qualities and character and managing its limitations.

The Australian mussel industry for example, manages its seasonality constraints (whereby mussels are best flavoured in summer even though they are available all year round) by making an event out of the product to boost awareness and consumption when the product eats best. For more information click here.  

Could goatmeat’s time to shine be in the autumn and winter months, where its long slow cooking times and richer and more complex flavours are a better fit to consumers and chef’s cooking aspirations and taste expectations?

The Luv-a-duck brand has transformed duck from being a hard-to-replicate, ‘special’ item eaten mostly in restaurants to something far more accessible to the home cook.

They bred a duck with a good amount of meat, developed semi-prepared easy-to-follow recipe kits and paired this with support via cooking classes and recipe guidance. Could this be a possible solution to some of the consumer barriers around goatmeat: “It’s too hard to replicate at home/too much risk of failure”? Can goatmeat own some uniquely flavoured dishes and simplify the home cooking experience by pre-marinating, spicing or tenderising the meat?

This opportunity ties in well with new cooking implements and trends such as the Webber Q, enabling consumers to embrace things like pulled pork. Why not pulled goat? Implements currently used in restaurant kitchens such as ‘Sous Vide’ can bring out the best in goatmeat and these will become accessible to those consumers willing to furnish their homes with the latest devices – just look at the Thermomix.

Initially focusing on consumers who are the most experimental and have the greatest influence on others will pay dividends in the long run to sustainably and incrementally build demand.

Several value-add opportunities are presented in the project final report, where defined consumer segments and key occasions have been identified along with a range of existing problems that consumers need solving.

These value-add options accentuate goatmeat’s properties and seek to overcome some of its inherent barriers to usage, making it more commercially viable as a solution.

The initial opportunities the domestic market should consider are listed below along with indicative values/volumes per year.

Download the full project report here. A short webinar talking through the project results can be downloaded and watched here.

If you would like to discuss a project idea and the potential of MLA Donor Company to co-fund 50% of the cost, contact Julie Petty at jpetty@mla.com.au or 0411 680 516