Argyle Prestige Meats in Hong Kong deal to access Chinese retail outlets

UPDATE: ONE of Australia’s fastest growing packaged beef and sheep meat businesses has just joined forces with a Hong Kong company to expand its sales into China.

Lachie and Andrina Graham have built up the Argyle meat business into a global operation, selling into 2000 retail outlets in Australia and Asia.

UPDATE: ONE of Australia’s fastest growing packaged beef and sheep meat businesses has just joined forces with a Hong Kong company to expand its sales into China.

Argyle Foods Group, run by brothers Lachie and Bryce Graham, fourth-generation farmers at Harden, NSW, has raised capital from strategic Australian and foreign investors through the issue of convertible notes.

The major investor in the capital raising is the Dah Chong Hong company, listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and a business with extensive distribution networks throughout Asia.

DCH has taken a minor stake in Argyle Foods Group, according to a statement issued this week.

The Graham family had built up a business called Argyle Prestige Meats to sell beef and lamb produced on their 4050ha property at Harden.

The Grahams run an Angus stud, commercial beef and prime lamb operation on the property.

Lachie Graham and wife Andrina were The Weekly Times Coles 2013 Australian Farmer of the Year winners.

With Bryce, they have built the Argyle Prestige Meats brand into a business that supplies 2000 retail outlets in Australia and Asia.

In 2013, the Argyle business entered into a 50-50 joint venture with the Manildra Group to expand the operation, using Manildra’s beef-fattening operation adjacent to its starch, gluten and ethanol plant at Nowra.

The partners set up Argyle Foods Group in June this year to allow new investors to eventually hold an equity stake in the food operation.

The Graham family and Manildra Enterprises Pty Limited remain major shareholders.

A statement released this week says Argyle “plans to leverage on its latest technology, best practices and highest industry standard of the processing plant in Australia to replicate it in a proposed China processing plant”.

Lachie Graham said the group planned to open a processing plant in each of eastern and southern China to process a range of products, including Australian beef and lamb but also seafood, pork, poultry and dairy foods.

“So we will keep the slaughtering and deboning in Australia and send prime meat for further processing and portioning into retail packs in China,” he said.

“We will replicate our model in Australia: similar plants, same equipment, managed by the same management team, with the people on the ground up there providing the same products and brands as from the sister plant like we now operate in Nowra.”