Selling your Chubbies...legally



                By Donna OShaughnessy AKA The Midlife Farmwife


It started so innocently. Attending a gathering hosted by a farm friend of ours we were happy to be off the farm a few hours. Kim, the friend, had invited several farmers she knew raising meat like we were (no antibiotics, no hormones and on pasture) along with several chefs and restaurant owners who wanted to serve the same kind of meat.

She said nothing about grocery store owners.

So when Cassie Green of Green Grocer in Chicago approached us and started asking LOTS of questions about our farm, we were caught off guard. We had just learned, well sort of learned, how to deliver animal carcasses to restaurants, now someone was wanting us to deliver to their grocery store.
A really nice grocery store. http://www.greengrocerchicago.com/

So, OK, how hard can that be? A few packages, a few price lists, extra income...could be fun. So we went to our favorite library, Google Community Library. Unfortunately, there was very little and what was there was very vague, leaving us...very frustrated.

The Grocery Store was ready for fresh frozen 100% grass fed beef YESTERDAY and not wanting to lose the opportunity we plunged ahead. We had a fair amount of frozen meat already in our freezers, all we had to do was label it. So geniuses that we were, we grabbed a bunch of our business cards and started taping them to the ice cold white plastic "chubbies"  of ground beef.

Funny, how Scotch tape won't stick to a frozen block of meat. We tried packaging tape. Nope. Then electrical tape, please don't ask me why. Again, no. Then I remembered this super glue spray adhesive I had in my studio upstairs. It was intensely sticky, in fact I kept getting my fingers glued together under our business cards. Trying to dislodge my fingers resulted in extreme pain and the removal of several  fingerprints.

Now I understood why people are  finding the occasional human digit in their food purchases.

But, at least it was working! After affixing several business cards to several ground beef packages and nearly asphyxiating ourselves with the fumes of the adhesive I suddenly realized...this might not be such a good idea being as our meat was, how shall I say it ?...ORGANIC!

So feeling totally idiotic we went back to the packing tape wrapping it around and around and around the meat tube holding the business card in place. Heck we used enough tape to hold a Volkswagen in place to those dang meat tubes.

Then we realized none of the packages had weights on them. How were we going to charge the restaurant and how were they going to come up with a price for their customers? So we ran out to get a scale, an ordinary food scale. (Later we learned about the phrase "Approved for Trade" and bought a digital scale.) We then weighed each package and wrote it in black Sharpie on our business card.

What a mess. After that fiasco it was time to produce an invoice, except the printer was out of ink. Just so you know, we live 60 miles from any store that carries printer ink. The next day we drove the two hours to Grand Ave. in Chicago and sheepishly delivered 50 pounds of 100% grass fed, certified organic beef with falling off labels, ink smeared weights and a hand written invoice. Beet red with embarrassment I practically threw the chubbies at the cashier. I just wanted to crawl back under our country bumpkin rock and never show my amateur face again.

They took it all and wrote us a check.

I kept thinking to myself, "Oh great, what are they trying to do? Encourage us?!" Which is exactly what happened. Cassie the owner took a chance with this small family farm and over the next two years we improved our product marketing, just another phrase for chubby selling. We called the Department of Agriculture who answered some questions and told us about other resources. We snooped shamelessly at other farmers meat labels in similar stores. I even took pictures of others peoples meat, stop giggling please, and copied what they had done.

I called the locker plant for their input and over time we learned not only how to grow excellent beef and pork but how to process, package, label and market it. We are no experts but at least our packages no longer resemble a second graders science fair entry.

To learn more about marketing your own farm
raised meat the author recommends:
       Farm Fresh: Direct Marketing, Meats & Milk by Allan Nation
       Grass-Fed Cattle: How to Produce and Market Natural Beef  by Julius Ruchel
      Contacting your States Department of Agriculture
      The National Organic Program quidelines for Organic labeling