Sustainable Meat at Scale
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
When you hear about how little of the food dollar goes to the farmer, you may wonder why we just can’t cut out some of the middlemen? There are a lot of answers to that question, but a big problem is scale. Cream Co Meats founder Clifford Pollard hopes to bring more scale to smaller sustainable producers to make sustainable meat more economical.
Pollard… “ So really having leverage to get your foot in the door at a slaughterhouse is step one. When you start getting into those slaughterhouses that could take a full truckload, usually there's an advantage when it comes to technology, food service, interventions, professionalism around packaging, labeling, et cetera. You really want to have that benefit from beginning to end. They tend to provide a better finished good for us to then work with to further manufacture. So scale really helps for that. But also scale is really beneficial on the end user side, on the customer side. Like we have a contract with the California University system and they're looking for a super high velocity of regenerative grass fed stew, for instance. Well, there's not gonna be one singular grass fed, grass finished regenerative ranch that could provide the whole UC system with all the stew they're looking for. But when you start to pool together three, four, five different providers–all of a sudden you have enough scale for them to be able to say yes to that.”
Once again, that’s Clifford Pollard with Cream Co Meats.
