Jack's Creek Wagyu

The Warmoll family emigrated from Ireland in 1852, worked the Victorian and New South Wales gold fields, and opened butcher shops and a hide store at Gunnedah. In the late 1940s John Francis Warmoll, known as Jock, and his wife Lola Mary founded JF Warmoll & Co and bought cropping and grazing country at Breeza on the Liverpool Plains. Sons David and Phillip joined in the 1970s.

The name comes from the next purchase: a cattle property at Willow Tree on the Great Dividing Range called Big Jack's Creek. The family bred Black Angus there for eight years before anything Wagyu happened, which is why the Angus side of this business is not a sideline.

In 1991 David and Phillip began crossing the Black Angus herd with Tajima Wagyu sires from Hyogo Prefecture, the same lineage that sits behind Kobe. They formed Australian Certified Wagyu Beef, which has traded as Jack's Creek since 2000, and became one of the first Australian companies to breed, grow, feed, process and market Wagyu in one business. It is now led by Patrick Warmoll, Phillip's son, and exports to more than thirty destinations.

The breed position follows from that history: this is a cross, Angus with Tajima, and no generation or percentage is published. Naming Tajima is more than most brands offer, since it identifies the strain rather than just the country, but it describes the sire and not the animal.

Jack's Creek processes and markets grain-fed Wagyu and Black Angus, and sells across both. That matters when the name appears on a menu unqualified: a Jack's Creek steak is not automatically a Wagyu steak, and a kitchen that names the company has told you the supplier rather than the breed.

The awards are unusually specific for this category, and worth quoting as the company states them. Its homepage claims the World's Best Steak title for 2023 along with World's Best Grain Fed Steak, World's Best Sirloin Steak and Oceania's Best Steak; its story page describes two consecutive years as World's Best Steak Producer and current holder of World's Best Ribeye Steak for 2022. Named competitions with named years are checkable in a way that unattributed excellence is not.