Our factory
Everything we do within our factory is monitored, assessed, recorded, verified and audited to ensure absolute food safety and consistent product of the highest quality.
Situated in regional NSW away from the smog and pollution of metropolitan areas, we produce our jerky in a factory that was designed and built specifically for jerky production.
We are export registered and operate under a Hazard analysis, Critical Control Point (HACCP) based Quality Assurance Program. That means that every process within our factory, from product receival to production, waste disposal, cleaning even who we buy raw materials from is analysed on a daily basis. Everything we do within the factory is monitored, assessed, recorded, verified and audited to ensure absolute food safety and consistent product of the highest quality. Our systems mean that all product can be traced back to the day it left the factory, the day it was produced, when and where all the meat and ingredients arrived here and where it came from. These systems that are regularly audited by independent auditors to ensure that all of our actions are going toward producing the best product possible and any product leaving our factory is completely safe and wholesome.
Similar systems at Abattoirs allow all of the meat to be traced back to the farms they came from, when they were born and even which paddock they were born in. Abattoirs also have regulated sampling regimes to ensure that no meat containing antibiotics or hormones ever enter our food chain.
This traceability means that a bag of our jerky for sale at the service station in Thargomindah right in the far Southwest corner of QLD can be traced so thoroughly that we could find which farm, which cow and even which paddock the meat came from.
Within our system, we carry out regular, independent product testing to guarantee no chemical or biological contamination. We have recently updated our drying tunnels and equipment to increase our production capacity to over 4 ton of jerky each week.
We have our own refrigerated truck that to ensure we have control over all of our large deliveries and meat recievals. Our truck goes to Sydney weekly and Melbourne fortnightly.
Cootamundra is on the northeastern edge of the Riverina in NSW, about 4 hours southwest of Sydney. We’re probably best known in the cities as the place where Donald Bradman was born, even though he moved to Bowral a couple of years later and actually grew up there. There is often a line of busses outside the house he was born in as cricket nuts from around the world make the pilgrimage to pay homage to him. Of course Cootamundra Wattle (acacia Bayliana), the wattle that grows locally here is also widely recognized and immortalised in John Williamson’s song.
There are about 4,000 people in town, so its big enough that you don’t know everyone but you recognize most. A small town like this develops a really strong sense of community and there is a feeling that we all share a role in the future of our town. Our kids can still safely ride their bikes around town and the pool is the social hub for them in the summer.
We don’t have any traffic lights and no road rage because the person that you went through a give way on, driving to work, will probably be playing squash against you tonight or beside you at the gym. There isn’t many sports that aren’t played in Coota and they are well catered for with some beautiful sports grounds and facilities. There is a fantastic mountain bike track right on the edge of town that accommodates all level of riders, we have one of the oldest golf courses in NSW and an Olympic sized swimming pool complimented by a heated indoor pool.
Coota is lucky to be in the middle of rich, fertile land and while we don’t always get all the rain our farmers need, we always get something, so farming is fairly reliable here. Farmers have always grown wheat and over the last 20 years a lot of farmers have included canola crops in their paddocks so in September/October the countryside is a patchwork of rich green wheat crops contrasted against yellow canola flowers that are so yellow it hurts your eyes. Fat lambs and beef cattle dot the surrounding hills and valleys so that sometimes the scene is so perfect you suspect must be computer generated.
Our location
Fresh air, friendly faces and not a single traffic light.