• Business: Cleaver’s
• Location: Australia-wide
• Products: Certified organic beef, lamb, chicken, sausages
• Customers: Supplying leading retailers around the country including Coles, Woolworths and IGA

For Cleaver’s, displaying Australian Organic Limited’s “Bud” certification mark on their products is central to their goal of being the world’s most sustainable meat producer.

Hewitt manages more than two million hectares of certified organic land across eight properties and aggregations, with 33,000 head of cattle under management. Its flagship brand, Cleaver’s, supplies retailers all over the country with certified organic beef, lamb, chicken and sausages.

Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Mick Hewitt, said the Bud logo symbolises the brand’s authenticity.

“The Bud is a recognisable signature of integrity in the organic industry and an important sign of trust between us and our customers,” Mr Hewitt said.

“It’s essentially a stamp of excellence when it comes to organic production and verifies the quality that we strive for at Cleaver’s.

“As people are looking to adopt more sustainable lifestyles, there’s a huge opportunity for organic products domestically and globally, particularly in the Australian red meat industry.

“Cleaver’s is the oldest red meat brand in Australia to be associated with certified organics, with the Bud logo helping us build on that trust and expand into more certified organic properties.”

From its inception in 1987, Hewitt has been driven by an organic-first ethos of treating animals, people and the land well.

All Cleaver’s products are free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), antibiotics, added hormones, synthetic chemicals and artificial preservatives, colours and flavours.

Chief Executive for Agribusiness, Ben Hewitt, said the limited external tools and inputs of organic production meant Hewitt’s farm management system was based around what nature can do for itself.

“We look at how we can repair the soils using nature and biology, and ensuring the animals are on a rising plane of nutrition and reducing any setbacks in their life so they’re performing and producing as well as they can,” Mr Hewitt said.

“We manage livestock over a wide variety of land types, so we use a combination of rotational grazing, set stocking and other methods to ensure we can weather the seasonal changes and get through the dry times.

“Our livestock are free ranging on pasture their entire life – as close as nature intended it to be as possible.

“We’ve had this approach for many years now which has resulted in premium quality soil and better genetics coming through, and that helps us produce the high-quality product we put on the shelves.

“The Bud logo gives our customers confidence they’re getting products free from antibiotics or artificial, growth-promoting hormones.

“It’s a guarantee that our product is truly organic and has been verified from the soil to the supermarket shelves.”