BACK FROM CANADA Market For Lamb “Wide Open”

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31079, 7 June 1966, Page 14

BACK FROM CANADA Market For Lamb “Wide Open”

The Canadian market for New Zealand lamb was “wide open,” said Mr A. Tremaine when he returned to Christchurch yesterday after a seven-week tour of Canada and parts of the United States promoting lamb on behalf of the Meat Board.

“We had a phenomenal reception,” he said.

Switchboards were jammed after each of the 17 television and 11 radio programmes during the tour, in which Mr Tremaine talked about lamb and demonstrated ways of cooking it.

One television programme, in Toronto, resulted in 620 letters in two days from people wanting further information, and after a lecture at the University of British Columbia’s Institute of Technology, the “Vancouver Sun” deits full front page to New Zealand lamb.

“We got up to 400 professional caterers and hotel people at lectures at most of the hotel schools throughout the country, and every one was written up in the papers as a success,” he said. “Canadians are very keen to buy our product for the simple reason that they’re growing very little of their own.

“There are certain things we should do, in the way of marketing techniques,” Mr Tremaine said. “We have to teach these people how to handle it properly, in supermarkets.” He found Canadians were unaware of the proper ways of cooking lamb. “They openly admitted it at lectures and in interviews. “What is hard to believe in New Zealand—the land of lamb—is that they just don't eat it at all, and so they have no clues about ways of using it”

Chefs and catering managers were interested in lamb only if they could pre-

sent it attractively and economically on their menus. “This was the thing we showed them how to do,” he said. Between 8000 and 10,000 copies of a booklet containing a dozen recipes and other material, prepared by Mr Tremaine, were sent to persons who wrote in requesting them. Mr Tremaine said that when housewives were asked why they had never tasted mutton, they replied: “We don’t know how to cook it”

“This is a great advantage to us,” he said. “If we can inutroduce it now and show them how to cook it, we’ve sold them the idea.” The promotion campaign also included upper New York State, where Mr Tremaine gained the impression that market possibilities in America were “very hopeful.” “If we sell it a bit harder —which they like—there will be no problems.” He felt it was necessary to follow up the tour with further promotion. To help towards this, an “international guide to New Zealand lamb” is now being printed. Written by Mr Tremaine, it contains more than 200 ways of preparing and handling lamb, is hard-covered, with about 300 pages, and has illustrations in colour-

“Towards the end of the year it will go out to the people with whom we’ve made contact” he said. “This is what they’ve been asking for.”