Developing a More Sustainable Meat Supply Chain

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Working towards a more sustainable food system doesn’t necessarily have to start on a farm. Sometimes, it begins in the kitchen. Clifford Pollard is the CEO and Founder of Cream Co Meats, and his path into the meat industry came through years spent cooking professionally. Pollard says his experience working with chefs showed him some gaps in the existing meat industry.

Pollard… “ I mean, I've been in the industry for almost about 20 years. Prior to getting into the meat industry, I cooked professionally in the Bay Area. And one of the things that I really saw my chefs struggling with was sourcing really high quality ingredients and that whole California cuisine ethos really focusing on the provenance of the vegetable, or the ranch, the meat, the genetics, the breeds, the diets of these animals. Getting into that level of nuance when it came to sourcing was challenging for these chefs. There wasn't really a distribution platform that was also focused on those same types of attributes that the chefs were most interested in. And so going through that myself, experiencing it firsthand, eventually led me down the path of wanting to build a better solution for those types of buyers, which has kind of blossomed into a pretty large marketplace of folks who are looking for those types of animals with pretty similar attributes. Cream Co is helping to connect those dots.”

Cream Co Meats is a USDA platform that works to support small-scale farmers in the meat industry, specifically sustainable and regenerative operations.