Local beef producer Jack’s Creek has won yet another award, this time taking out the Class 4 Open F1 Wagyu Steak category at the 2024 Wagyu Branded Beef Competition.
“We’re very proud to have won the F1 Open Class,” Jack’s Creek Managing Director Patrick Warmoll said.
The steak was a sirloin with 55% marbling and a marbling fineness of 8.6, with the judges describing it as “The complete Wagyu package, with delightfully outstanding tender and lasting buttery juiciness with caramel undertones.”
F1 refers to a hybrid of Wagyu and Black Angus, two breeds Warmoll states are renowned for both their marbling and marketability – important, Warmoll says, for Jack’s recent push into the United States, where Angus is seen as the premium mainstream beef breed.
The conference was held in Cairns this year, with Wagyu producers from around the country attending and competing, with Jack’s Creek having won the Purebred Wagyu class the previous year.
Warmoll was quick to point out that while Jack’s Creek was responsible for the feedlotting and finishing of the steer that made the winning steak, he gave full credit to its breeders.
“It was produced by Stamo Beef, the Stamatopoulos family, out at Dungog. They bred that animal, they supplied it to our backgrounding facility at Breeza, where it was fed on grain for 120-150 days.”
From Breeza, the cattle are finished at the Lemontree Feedlot on the Darling Downs, before being processed at the Northern Cooperative Meat Company at Casino.
There is, Warmoll says, “no secret recipe” to raising a winning steak.
“It’s just doing things consistently – get the data at the other end, and use that as a feedback loop to see how we’re producing our beef, and use things like the awards as a barometer to compare how we’re doing within the industry.”
Warmoll states that the F1 strain is very important for their international markets, with the United States being a new, but highly contested, market for the company, with US both acutely aware of Japanese Wagyu and Kobe Beef, and being the largest beef producer in the world, with a fifth of global production, as well as breaking into the UK market with the Australia-UK Free Trade Agreement making imports into Britain a lot easier.
Distribution in the UK and Europe is handled by German provedores Albers Gmbh, with Frank Albers flying into Cairns, along with Harry Houghton and Tara Anderson from Harrods London which carries Jack’s Creek Wagyu in its famous Food Hall.
It’s not the first big award that the family-run has won, with the company taking out the World’s Best Steak Award for three of the last eight years, though with perhaps a little less effort than might be expected.
“The first year we entered,” Warmoll says, “our German distributor just picked the meat out of his inventory in Dusseldorf and submitted that to the competition and it won.”