With links between saturated fat in the diet and health, consumers are increasingly favouring leaner meats. Increases in carcass lean weight and lean percentage can be achieved within breeds through selection. Yet fat may enhance post-slaughter processing and cooking of red meat and thus reductions in fat depots could detract from eating quality.

In the UK, selection decisions within terminal sire flocks are increasingly being based on a combination of liveweight and ultrasonic measures of fat and muscle depth. The underlying goal in these programmes is to increase the daily rate of lean tissue growth. In most pedigree flocks in terminal sire breeds ram lambs are reared on a high plane of nutrition. Yet most lambs in the UK are reared in extensive production systems. Thus it is important to know whether differences in performance of rams reared under feeding practices typical in pedigree flocks translate into detectable differences among their crossbred progeny in carcass composition and eating quality characteristics under grass finishing. In this study, the objective was to evaluate whether consumers could detect differences in the appearance and eating quality in shoulder joints from extensively reared crossbred lambs sired by Suffolk rams, with high or low lean growth index scores.