Every morning, staff at Western Australia’s Nebru Plains beef export company grab a digital camera, photograph the carcasses of 10 or 15 beasts and email the results to distributors in Japan.

Moments later, the online pictures are forwarded to Japanese butchers or retail meat outlets which use the images to select the beef they want to purchase. They can then bid – online – for individual carcases. Within two hours Nebru Plains has confirmed the purchase of each selection with the customer while the carcase is being boned in preparation for export.

For Nebru Plains, the future has already arrived. And it doesn’t stop there.

When Japanese consumers buy Nebru beef from their butcher, the products carry stickers with ID numbers that operate as “passports” for each carcase. Purchasers can punch the number into a website in Japan, operated under Nebru’s brand name, “Rob’s Beef”, and instantly receive details on the product.

The information includes where the beef carcase has come from, the farm on which it was raised, the feedlot that fattened it … even photos and biographies of the producing farmers, their families and their properties.

Diana Nottle, Managing Director of Nebru Plains, says the “passport” system – thought to be the first of its kind – was developed following the discovery of BSE in Japan. The aim of the passport IDs was to assure Japanese consumers that beef from Western Australia was safe, healthy and tasty – and convince them to buy more.

She said demand for beef was now slowly growing after having dropped to almost zero, but figures for beef imports into Japan in March were still only half those at the same time in 2001.

Nebru is a multiple interest operation. One arm, Nebru Plains Pty Ltd, owns and operates a 2,700-hectare property at Three Springs, 350 kilometres north of Perth. It carries a constant cattle population of around 7,000 Angus, Shorthorns and Murray Greys, fed up to 350 days on Nebru’s feedlot. Nebru develops its own feed, aimed at producing beef that meets extremely high standards demanded by Japanese customers.

A second arm of the company is Nebru Exports which owns and runs an export licensed beef abattoir at Mandurah. All the company’s cattle are slaughtered there and it utilises cutting-edge technology and design to handle more than 150 head a day. About 200 tonnes of beef is shipped to Japan every month with another 100 tonnes exported to Korea.

Ms Nottle said Nebru was the only abattoir in Australia that could trace individual beef portions from the live animal to the export package delivered in Japan and saw the system as a competitive advantage. A new marketing twist could see a Japanese supermarket competition in which a family could win a trip to Western Australia.

Meat and Livestock Australia says it expects more producers will begin to adopt traceability regimes similar to the one operated by Nebru.