ORGANIC certification is still valuable, but in a world where the word “organic” has been somewhat devalued by sheer ubiquity, “organic plus” is better.
That’s the experience of Arcadian Natural and Organic Meat Company, which picked up two gold medals at the 2015 Australian Organic Awards for organic ventures in which organic is only part of the consumer pitch.
Arcadian’s win in the Best Organic Product - Food section was for its Paleo beef sausage, a product marketed through Arcadian’s retail arm, Cleavers, to the growing numbers of people adopting the “Paleo diet”.
The Paleo diet was conceived around the understanding that human genetics developed before many modern foods were consumed.
The diet aims, within limits, to avoid foods - like refined grains - not available to our Paleolithic ancestors, and to use foods that approximate a pre-historic diet, without the mammoths and with modern conveniences.
Cleavers’s Paleo beef and pork sausages and patties are “preservative free, soy free and grain free” and endorsed by Paleo enthusiast and chef Pete Evans.
In keeping with Paleo principles, Cleavers only uses grass-fed beef in its award-winning sausages. The loudest statement on the product packaging is “Grass-Fed!”, followed by the Paleo label, with organic certification a modest third.
Arcadian also won the Export Market Leader category. Arcadian’s chief executive, Alister Ferguson, said that a similar pattern is at work in the United States, easily the biggest of Arcadian’s eight overseas markets.
Several years ago, Arcadian was selling beef to the US based on its organic certification.
These days, Mr Ferguson said, organic and grass-fed attributes - Arcadian products are both - each appeal to different categories of American consumer.
That means a package of Arcadian meat advertising both attributes can appeal to two types of shopper.
Arcadian exports about threequarters of its product. The biggest current obstacle to growing its markets here and overseas, Mr Ferguson said, is rain.
Arcadian has got several new organic cattle producers “with good scale” coming on-stream in 2016.
In normal times, Mr Ferguson said, these new sources of supply might have enabled the company to grow by 20-25 per cent. But because drought has carved such a hole in the carrying capacity of the company’s usual suppliers, the new stock will merely give Arcadian the ability to hold production steady.
