What’s the beef with the way we buy steaks? Let Crowd Cow CEO Joe Heitzeberg explain.
“You look at how beef is traditionally sold: it’s big business, it’s retail, it’s lots of middlemen,” Heitzeberg said.
That leaves small, traditional ranchers “raising beef the artisanal way” to farmers’ markets, Heitzeberg explains, which means less access for many shoppers.
Crowd Cow is working to change that. The company enables consumers to buy shares of individual cows from ranches through its site, stressing the differences that make each of these grass-fed ranches unique.
“What we’re really doing is reinventing the way you get your food from the ground up, in the way it would exist if the Internet had been here 100 years ago,” Heitzeberg said.
The model is appealing to ranchers like Carrie Richards, who recently moved from Oakland to Oregon House, California, to run day-to-day operations at the Richards Family Ranch. Richards, a fifth-generation rancher, is trying to move beyond wholesaling to reach consumers directly.
“A company like Crowd Cow would increase that retail capability for us, which would be a whole other stream of income for us,” Richards said.
Richards is in talks currently to become the first California-based supplier for Crowd Cow, which is based in Seattle and has worked with Washington-based ranchers to date.
“What I like about Crowd Cow is every cow they sell, they feature the ranch, and they explain how the cow was raised, and they feature all the different aspects that make that ranch unique,” Richards said. “And that’s important because every ranch is doing something different, so you can choose which cow and which ranch appeals to you.”
By improving the process of selling grass-fed beef, Crowd Cow could also help lure younger, would-be ranchers back to the land. As far back as 2007, the USDA was lamenting that the fastest growing group of farm operators is those 65 years and older.
“Technology is making life easier for the rancher,” Richards said. “It’s overwhelming to come up here and see all the hands-on stuff. To have a company like this where they deal with it and you can concentrate on ranching? It makes it less overwhelming.”