I spotted this branding at the grocery store last winter. What in the world? A product of New Zealand, labeled as “Atkins Ranch- Founded in San Francisco 1989”. COOL seems like a good thing here, preventing defrauding the consumer into believing they are buying a local/domestic product when they aren’t. I can’t figure: are they hoping consumers will just be in a hurry and not notice this discrepancy? Or do they think consumers are that dumb? Are consumers that dumb? Or willing to purchase product that’s so deceptively labeled? If I were shopping for lamb at the store and saw this, it would annoy me and I would buy chicken instead.
I visited their website hoping for an explanation, but it left me further confounded. They have a good story. Grass-fed, non-GMO, naturally raised lambs, husbanded by family-run operations. Beautiful photos of landscapes, people and sheep. Why don’t they just stop there? But no, they have to create this tenuous link to San Francisco and sharing the same dinner hour as us:
Hello, people are loading their Monday cafeteria lunch trays in Wellington when I’m sitting down to a Sunday dinner on the West Coast. They even provide a hotlink to Google maps which shows us their “American Home” for their grass-fed lamb, a warehouse in Fremont:
Maybe it’s a good sign, that importers are feeling the pressure from the Lamb Board’s awesome American Lamb campaign. Anyway, the branding didn’t seem to last more than a week at our grocery store and hasn’t been back. 😂
The Collie Farm Blog 
June 15, 2018 at 6:52 am
Most likely the New Zealand lamb would be cheaper and of a better quality that is supplied to the domestic New Zealand consumer. Last time I looked at lamb at our local supermarket it was over NZ$20 a kilo for loin chops. Thankfully, we are in a position to own and kill our own sheep.
June 15, 2018 at 3:23 pm
It makes me sad that we have to be on guard at all times with food. I am beginning to think that food is the sneakiest industry of all. BTW, that chicken you would buy instead? Often processed in China, shipped back and forth! Crazy world.
June 16, 2018 at 3:57 am
LOL, TexomaMorganLady , I know that chicken subject got a lot of press, that the USDA technically allows it. But I don’t think it actually happens. Ocean freight is pretty expensive and slow, and air freight is fast but even more expensive. The labor cost savings to process in China wouldn’t offset the cost to handle and ship both ways. Profit margins on chicken are razor-thin, so I don’t think it travels far. We still have a chicken processor north of Seattle, even though most other animal processing has left the west side of the state decades ago. So they still must be beating out-of-state producers on price by being “local”.
Lamb is a special case- Australia and NZ have figured out a special deal for ocean freight shipping- they don’t hang the carcasses anymore, they pack them fresh in NO2 vacuum packs, and they age in those packages in transit. So it technically arrives here as “fresh” lamb, even though it’s been on a boat for a couple weeks. And, to be fair, the US doesn’t produce enough lamb to meet market demand, so ANZ is happy to fill our shortfall… It’s just silly when they label it deceptively, vs just being honest about the product origin.
June 16, 2018 at 4:14 am
jaspersdoggyworld, I had to have google help me with the math… So these lamb chops were $9.99/lb USD. So that’s $13.42AUD for 0.45kg…. So our price converts to $29AUD/Kg, which I suppose makes sense that it would be slightly higher than retail there. Interesting that you feel the best quality lamb gets exported.
June 29, 2019 at 5:02 pm
Technically they are not required to put country of origin on the package. During that crazy up swing in beef prices in 2014 they thought it would help keep consumer prices stable to allow imported beef to be marketed as local. This covered all red meats. I don’t think it was ever changed back.
June 29, 2019 at 6:16 pm
Avery, the Lamb industry chose to lobby to keep COOL, and it is still in place: https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/cool