Great Lakes Dairy Sheep Symposium - the Department of Animal ...

Meat and meat dishes:
1. Legs: whole or boned for cooler months, steaks for summer BBQ’s, or cut into cubes
for kebabs.
2. Boned and rolled shoulders. Smoked or natural
3. A full range of sausages with sheep meat only, flavours include: merguez, mustard
and tarragon, wine and shallots, fine herbs, basil and tomato.
4. “Confit d’agneau” (leg of lamb cooked in duck fat and sold in 120-150gm, 3-4 ounce
vacuum packed bags)
5. sliced smoked meat (from the shoulder, leg and boned loin of cull animals)
6. terrine d’agneau (made with cognac, ground lamb and liver)
Wool, hides, and soap:
1. Hides are available either large or small (although we are experimenting with, and
have the intent of tanning our own raw hides, we are presently reselling already
tanned hides)
2. 2-, 3-, or 4-ply wool in skeins of all natural colours only, nothing dyed and no wool
washed with chemicals
3. socks, pure wool, no nylon or dye
As I go through this list, it’s important that you understand how we try to realize the potential
hidden in every sheep in our operation .A twinning ewe can gross well over 1500$Can in
products from wool, meat, and dairy.
Products Yet To Master
Hoofs, knuckles, skulls, eyeballs
Pricing
1. Our pricing needs to be competitive with the other shops we distribute to so we don’t
undercut them, but at the same time we need to be able to offer an advantageous price if
they buy directly from us.
2. We have a 30% mark-up over our production cost, which is at the lower end of the scale
these days
3. We have specials most weeks that allow us to move more product, particularly as fresh
meat gets close to its expiration date and must be frozen. We learned quickly which
products weren’t selling as our distributor was returning with frozen meat that hadn’t sold
over the course of the week. It soon became obvious that we either had to discount it,
bring it back to the butcher who would make other products from it, or eat it ourselves!
4. We decided on a coupon system where there is a monthly drawing for a prize valued at
50$ each time you buy $20 and over of total products.
Promotion / Marketing / Advertising
1. Word of mouth has worked better than anything (check out the “Guerrilla Marketing”
books by Jay Conrad Levinson)
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