As consumers increase demand for higher eating quality, meat processors are working to improve ways of assessing meat eating quality.
Both performance recording systems, SIL in New Zealand and Lambplan in Australia, anticipate the time soon when producers will be rewarded for high eating quality carcases and have been working to develop eating quality indexes for terminal sires. In 2015 Lambplan implemented two eating quality indexes (EQ and LEQ) while SIL is currently working on plans to introduce an eating quality index.
The Eating Quality index developed and used by Lambplan (Eating-Quality-indexes-EQ) combines the usual terminal production targets of growth + muscle + leanness with eating quality traits such as intramuscular fat and shear force.
The entire 2017 drop of Karioi White Suffolk lambs has Eating Quality index values in the top 40% of all Australian terminal sheep on Lambplan (more than 120,000 terminal sheep currently recorded in Lambplan).