AUGUST 2025
. 31
FROM PAGE 29
the new line of Rubia Gallega’s he has imported from Spain. Sandy Cameron, a veterinarian by trade, is also very hands-on at the family’s property, Glenspean. In fact as he’s chatting, he’s in the middle of a paddock fixing a burst water pipe from a trough. Both Blackmore and Cameron agree the true recipe of their success, and the success of any agribusiness, is consistency of quality and supply, and never taking your eye off the ball. “If we have one bad batch we are in trouble,” Blackmore says. “Our brand is our reputation. If a restaurant serves a bad steak, they’ve lost a customer and so have we. I love our cattle and I still do all the genetics myself, and one of the things I look forward to most is looking at the carcasses every month, looking at the weight and depth of marbling, I still get a buzz out of that.” “It’s one thing to have a nice logo but you’ve got to have the end-to-end capability sorted first, you have to be able to have continuous supply of product or the business will fail,” adds Cameron. “You can have all the marketing money in the world but if you don’t have a product to sell, you’ve got nothing.” Similarly, neither has ever compromised quality to achieve better prices. “I’ve never discounted my beef, never,” says Blackmore emphatically. Cameron concurs: “It’s always tempting to go into new markets but we’ve never compromised our quality to get down to a price that suits others. We’ve never done that and we never will. We have certain values that are at our core, they are our guiding vision. “We strive for sustainability in terms of our environment, financial and social, for example, not adding sugar to our yoghurt. We know more people would buy our yoghurt if we had sugar in it, and we’d get more shelf life out of our cheese if we added preservatives, but we don’t want to do that. It’s the little things that matter.”
got to aim to have the best product, or the most reliable supply, or the cheapest price, you’ve got to do something that makes someone buy.” While place and provenance matter, and have the potential to catapult a brand, equally, a clever brand can also put a region on the international map. It’s fair to say that the pretty locale of Meredith was hardly a household name before the Camerons came along, and places like the Margaret River, Bundaberg, King Island, Milawa, Maffra, Murray River and Byron Bay are now synonymous with everything from beef to cheese, biscuits, chocolate, salt and soft drinks, creating another economic opportunity through agritourism. Both domestic and international visitors are increasingly visiting the farm gates of their favourite brands, and the CSIRO predicts that the opportunity to sample cheese at a dairy, meet a winemaker or spend a night on a cattle station will contribute $18.6 billion to the Australian economy by 2030. Bundaberg Brewed Drinks pink grapefruit soft drink, a new line to their traditional ginger beer, is now the No.1 soft drink in South Korea. The brand skyrocketed when K-Pop stars Stray Kids promoted their range of ginger beer on social media. “It’s a social media phenomenon,” says David Williams. “If you’re a 25-year-old in South Korea, there’s nothing more fashionable than being photographed drinking a bottle of Bundaberg Grapefruit or Ginger Beer. The brand is incredibly strong and people in Australia take for granted how successful Bundaberg is – a family run and built company.” F IVE-STAR restaurants and accolades are one thing, but David Blackmore insists that he still gets a buzz being out in the paddock with his cattle each day, especially
Otway Pork farm manager Hayden Stocks with some friends (top), a succulent Otway Pork ham (above) and a herd of Meredith Dairy goats (below).
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