4D Saturday, September, 2004 – Omaha World - Herald

Wagyu beef fills premium niche

Breeders and packers meet to explore potential

By Mark Kawar

World-Herald Staffwriter

“I didn’t expect it to be any different. But when I looked at the meat from the first one, it looked like super prime.”
As a small slaughterhouse competing in an industry domi-nated by a few big players, J.F. O’Neill Packing Co. has to be a little creative.
The south Omaha packer be-gan slaughtering antibiotic-free cattle in 2000, at the time be-coming the only plant in the country certified to export beef to the European Union. The plant kills organic beef, natural beef and bison.
So it isn’t surprising that O’Neill is at the forefront of an-other small but growing niche in the meat industry – Wagyu beef.
In Japanese, “wa” means Japanese-style and “gyu” means beef. Wagyu generally refers to a few breeds developed in Ja-pan. Wagyu cattle raised in Ja-pan’s Kobe region produce the ultra-premium Kobe beef.
Mike O’Neill, O’Neill Pack- / Mike O’Neill, president, O’Neill Packing, commenting
On the first time he processed Wagyu beef
Ing’s president remembers the first time he processed Wagyu at the plant in the mid-1990’s.
“I didn’t expect it to be any different,” he said. “But when I looked at the meat from the first one, it looked like super prime. The other one was just as good. I said, ‘You mean to tell me you can get a steady supply of this?’”
O’Neill now slaughters 500 Wagyu a month, one of only a handful of U.S. packers that kill the animals. The plant is the sponsor of the American Wagyu Association’s annual convention Friday and today at the downtown Embassy Suites in Omaha. The several dozen Wagyu farmers, packers and dis- / tributors in attendance are opti- mistic that their premium beef will become as popular in this country as it is in Japan.
America’s Wagyu farmers once exported much of their product to Japan but have been forced to find other customers after that country halted Ameri-can imports last year because of fear of mad cow disease.
Over the convention’s two days, the Wagyu groups will ex-plore issues such as how to mar-ket its beef, how to use data analysis to improve genetics and how to create better cuts of meat.
Europeans began importing
See Wagyu: Page 2

Omaha World - Herald

Wagyu:
Premium beef fills niche
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Beef cattle into Japan in the late 19th century, and over the year’s distinctive Japanese breeds’ de-veloped. Seeking to gain a piece of the lucrative Japanese beef market, Americans began rais-ing Wagyu in 1993, importing 35 cattle from Japan. Most of the Wagyu in America are not crossbreeds.
In the decade since, the popu-larity of the breed has grown to the point that the Wagyu association now has 71 ranches, farms and pacers as members. O’Neill and the Morgan Ranch in Bur-well are the only Nebraska members.
R.L. Freeborn, a Wagyu pro-ducer from Oregon and past president of the association, esti-mates that there are 15,000 Wagyu in America. The beef sells for 10 percent to 15 percent more than regular Angus beef because of its quality, he said.
It is often featured on the menus of premium restaurants, in forms such as $100 steaks, $40 hamburgers or $20 hot dogs.
Tim DeCamp of Austin Meat Co. in New York has been selling Wagyu to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut restaurants for the past year and a half. The beef is so popular that he came to the Omaha convention to try of find new sources.
It’s not hard to see why, he said, if you just look at the fee.
“This product is beautiful,” he said. “Guaranteed great marbling. The best steak you’ll eat.”

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