Winners of the National Lamb Day competition!

Posted on Monday, 16 February 2026

National Lamb Day was on Sunday 15 February.

To celebrate, we challenged you to name the cuts of lamb. 41 people entered and named all the cuts of lamb correctly, and were put in a random draw to win an ANZCO prize pack.

Congratulations to Balaji Leksshman of ANZCO Foods Waitara, who matched the cuts correctly and has taken home an ANZCO Foods prize pack! 

ANZCO Foods Green Island had the highest number of entries overall, so we're also sending a small prize to every employee who entered.

Here are the answers:

THE HISTORY

National Lamb Day is celebrated on 15 February to commemorate the day in 1882 when the first shipment of frozen sheep meat left from New Zealand aboard the Dunedin, captained by John Whitson and bound for London.

The shipment was organised by two entrepreneurs, William Davidson and Thomas Brydone, and left New Zealand on 15 February from Port Chalmers in Otago.

William Davidson was a British-based general manager of the New Zealand and Australian Land Company, whose landholdings in the two countries exceeded one million hectares. Davidson had taken an interest in refrigerated experiments, which had proved the concept, if not yet the economic viability, of shipping frozen meat around the globe. 

That historic journey of around 5,000 carcasses (only one of which needed to be condemned!) was the beginning of what is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. New Zealand farmers produce some of the best lamb and the rest of the world just can’t get enough.

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