The Other Red Meat
Today the Boston Globe (via AP) runs the kind of story that I never grow tired of, a story about producers who find new markets for old products or who revise old products to tap into unmet market demand. Today's example concerns what is argulably mankind's oldest food-related "product"- red meat.
In 1986, when ''red meat" was becoming a dirty phrase in a more health-conscious United States, cattle ranchers gathered in Doc and Connie Hatfield's barn to talk about finding a new market for their beef.After hearing from a health-club trainer, they chose what has come to be known as natural beef -- produced without growth hormones or antibiotics and fed exclusively vegetable feeds -- and marketed it directly to natural food stores, where they could get a premium price.
''We were going broke. We were whining about how tough things were," said Connie Hatfield, a founder of the co-op Country Natural Beef, widely sold as Oregon Country Beef. Then, ''We found out about the market for antibiotic- and hormone-free beef."
Thus, when things got tough, they didn't go ask their local congressional representative to pass a law to guarantee cattle farmers could thrive or survive as they had before. Nor did they form or join a lobby group that sought to block competition. Instead they did some basic market research, showed some entrepreneurial zeal, and took some claculated risks. According to the article, it has paid off:
Thanks to concerns about mad cow disease, the success of natural foods stores, and Americans' growing desire to know where their food comes from, natural meat is one of the beef industry's fastest-growing sectors. Over the past 10 years, Oregon Country Beef has gone from processing 3,400 head of cattle a year to 40,000. Since the mad cow scare in 2003, production has more than doubled.
Production has doubled since 2003! I can see why the cows were mad.