Lamb pastrami, lamb prime rib.
If Jaclyn Oyola has her way, you’ll be hearing all about these lamb products — and trying them, too.
The 1996 Cherry Hill East graduate, who is the CEO and founder of Aussie Select, is having her lamb products launched at Wegmans throughout the country.
She said that Aussie Select is the first-to-market line of all-natural, fully cooked lamb charcuterie, roasts and deli meat. The products are pasture-raised, halal-certified and free of artificial additives.
Sliced fresh at the deli, Aussie Select represents the first time lamb has been offered as a “sliceable, sandwich-ready and board-ready item, her company stated in a press release.
“We are launching in all Wegmans grocery stores in October, including right here in South Jersey,” said Oyola, whose full-time job is running the food and marketing team at Summit Food & Beverage. The Australian lamb industry is one of her clients.
“So it’s through them that I fell in love with the provenance, the product, and the potential. I was attuned to all of the research that says how much Americans love lamb. We don’t eat it as much as people do around the world. One of the No. 1 barriers to entry is fear of cooking.”
Oct. 6 is the available date for Wegmans stores, she added. It will be available in most stores by that date, but it is subject to change.
Fellow South Jersey native Michael Slavin, corporate chef for Aussie Select, noted in the press release that the lamb is sliced thin and ideal for food such as breakfast wraps.
“Aussie Select products bring a depth of flavor that instantly elevates sandwiches, wraps and boards,” Slavin said. “What excites me about the line is how approachable it makes lamb for everyday use.”
Oyola — who now resides in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, Georgia (although she still spends her summers at the Jersey Shore in Avalon) — said she came up with the idea visiting a local deli.
“Just standing in line at the deli one day, I wondered, obviously, with a frame of reference being lamb because I work on it every day … ‘Why is every protein available at the deli and not lamb?’” she asked. “You can find turkey, pork, chicken, beef, sometimes even duck, but lamb is not there. And I wondered if we took the labor, the cooking labor, away from lamb, could we do for lamb what, say, turkey deli meat did for turkey, and make it more than just about special occasions?
“So I brought the idea to the Australian red meat industry as a research and development project and they co-invested in the idea and we went about creating this thing. We incorporated in December of 2019, which was not the time to start a company, and powered through the pandemic. It feels like a blink.”
Oyola said that for many years, lamb has been viewed as “too fancy” or “hard to cook.”
“But we’re flipping that perception with approachable, ready-to-slice products like lamb pastrami and lamb prime rib. The line is Halal-certified, made with pasture-raised Australian lamb, and speaks to the growing appetite for global flavors and premium deli experiences,” she said.
She said that it’s tough to break into a grocery store’s deli counter, and also to win placement at Wegmans, “one of the most respected food retailers in the country.”
But this type of entrepreneurial spirit is in her blood: Her father and grandfather own a family business called Joseph Oat Corp. on the Camden waterfront. Its website describes it as “the oldest continuously operating industrial fabrication business in the United States.”
Oyola said that they purchased it back in the 1960s and that it’s one of the oldest family-run businesses in the country. It was originally founded in 1788 in Philadelphia.
“And so I grew up with a family business,” she said.
When her parents divorced, her mom remarried. She said her stepfather was also an entrepreneur, and he recently sold his business in West Collingswood Heights in the asphalt industry, but “continues to invest and drive new businesses forward.”
“So it’s that part of it is definitely in my blood, the risk-taking, the taking control of your own destiny. So for me, food is my jam, so it would make sense at this point, 25 years in food marketing, that food would be the place that I would lean in for my entrepreneurial thing,” Oyola said.
When Oyola, who was a communications major at Cornell, graduated in 2000, she thought her future was going to be in the television industry.
“I thought I wanted to be a television broadcaster,” said Oyola, who had interned at CNN over the summer in college. “That’s everything that I knew, and that was what my trajectory was going to be. So that is why I moved to Atlanta because I wanted to work for CNN. And the night before I got here, they canceled the entire entry-level production program.
“I said, ‘Well, I’ve already had my goodbye party and my car is packed, so it’d be really embarrassing to stay here.’ So I headed down to Atlanta, and I eventually got a job at a marketing agency and landed on a food account. I didn’t know anything about marketing, but I started my way from the bottom up. And today my full-time job is I still run that same food-and-beverage marketing team.”
Today, she is also a married mother. She had daughter, Sydney, 14, and son, Sam, 17, when she met her husband Raul Oyola, who has three older grown sons. Their blended family is large and loving.
Australia is another love.
When Jaclyn was in college she studied abroad for a time in Australia. She later had the chance to work the 2000 Sydney Olympics as an assistant to Bob Costas, who was the primetime host for NBC’s coverage of the games.
“So I I named my daughter after the most beautiful city in the world in Australia, my dog is Tas (after Tasmania),” she said. “I’m sort of all in on all things Australia.
“But, yeah, it’s just so exciting because Wegmans was my college grocery store. So for me to now see this product that I worked so hard on launched at the store that was essentially my first grocery store is almost like this full-circle moment and super duper exciting. And the fact that now my family and friends who have heard me talking about this product, they can actually go to the stores and buy it.”