On a chilly morning at a Sydney farmers market, a bubbly young woman greets customers with an enthusiasm most of us would struggle to muster when its this early and this cold.
Samantha Hayes and her parents Bill and Deirdre set up their meat retail business Mirrool Creek Lamb three months after the idea first came to them. So its no surprise when Hayes, 25, later reveals she comes from a long line of "raging optimists".
With her eyes firmly on the prize, Hayes has submitted her high-end meat products to this year's inaugural Branded Lamb Competition at the Royal Sydney Fine Food Show. "When you approach somebody new who doesn't know you or your product, they will ask you,What is so special about your lamb?'," Hayes says.
"We hope to be able to say, We are a gold medal-winner at the Fine Food Show'."
Mirrool Creek Lamb has been trading for just 18 months but the family has been preparing this venture for a century. Hayes is a fifth-generation lamb producer. For 125 years, the Rowallan Pastoral Company in NSW's Riverina has specialised in prime lamb production. Their livestock is sold at the Wagga Wagga prime lamb market, one of the largest livestock markets in the southern hemisphere. Mirrool Creek is 480km southwest of Sydney andabout an hour north of Wagga Wagga. The local town of Mirrool has one pub and a few silos. The undulating red soil countryside is perfect grazing and cropping land.
The Hayes family were experts at raising sheep for prime lamb meat. But their job ended at the livestock markets. Two years ago Sam Hayes
was studying for a masters degree in communications management and helping a friend distribute apples at farmers' markets when she recognised an opportunity.
Her father had often talked about diversifying the business but it was only now, with Sam based in Sydney, that the idea has been taken seriously.
"Nobody can know about home and our product as well as I do," Hayes says. Even so, there was a lot to learn. Just because they knew how to raise prime lamb, didn't mean they knew anything about preparing meat for retail. They had to get access to an abattoir- difficult
when you are a small producer-investigate packaging and distribution, and decide on aname and image for the brand. "We always wanted to go witha high-end product," she says.
It was a natural step from their farming philosophy. The name, too, came naturally. "It's not just an image, it's our reality - where we are from and what we do," she says. Three months later, in December 2006, Hayes was selling lamb from a stall at the Entertainment Quarter farmers' markets in Moore Park.