Digital Social Hour - The Lies of the Food Industry and Healthiest Types of Meats | Ben Spell DSH #300

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

On today's episode of Digital Social Hour, Ben Spell talks about the myths within the meat industry, why grocery stores need to be more transparent about their meat & how he plans on scaling Good Ranchers. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We want to get online. We want to launch online. That's what we want to do. We made the decision that we're not going to sell anything that we wouldn't be proud to bring into our own home and our guests. I read a book back in 2012, Creativity Inc. The very first page of the book, it says, quality is our business plan. And that just always resonated with me. Welcome back to the show, guys. Digital Social Hour. I'm your host as always, Sean Kelly. Got with me a great guest for you guys today who might change your perspective on the meat industry.

CEO of Good Ranchers, Ben Spell. Hey, hey, man. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, man. How's it going? Dude, it's good. I just flew in from Houston. Nice.

Boy, are my arms tired. Your story is very interesting, man. So I know you used to be a pastor, then you switched into becoming an entrepreneur, which is a very rare thing to happen, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was talking to some guys in your green room, which, by the way, amazing studio.

Thank you. This is really cool. I've never been in a podcast studio in a casino before. Yeah, but I was telling some guys in the green room that this was my very... I never planned to be an entrepreneur. I never planned to start a business, and Good Ranchers is the very first one that I started. And so I got really blessed to go one for one so far with having success.

Yeah, not a lot of people, their first company they start becomes an eight, nine-figure brand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's cool, but you know my story. I was a worship pastor at a mega church in Houston, and personally, I didn't like my salary coming straight from the church. And so I actually started praying and asking God to give me a side hustle. Of course, this was back before the term side hustle was coined. But I started asking God to give me something that I could do to make income that way I could just volunteer at the church

and not have to, you know, not that there's anything wrong with getting paid by the church. Yeah. You know, it's a full-time job. But just for me, that seed started growing, and about over a year and a half or so, I kept having this idea of a meat company. And I kept thinking, man, somebody could start a meat company and partner with farms and

actually bring quality to American families. Right. Because at that time, the really only big player was Omaha Steaks. And I don't know if anybody from Omaha Steaks is going to listen to this, but they sell a bunch of crap. And it's super... It's low quality. Very low quality.

They don't disclose the grade of it. They have their own grading system. That's sketchy. Yeah, so they don't disclose what the grade is of it, nor do they disclose where it comes from. There's no country of origin labeling law for beef and for pork in the u.s wow um so you can buy stuff in the grocery store that has an american flag sticker on it and it says uh that says um product of usa yeah and um and it can come straight from Mexico. It can come straight from a feedlot in Mexico or Brazil or Australia or New Zealand, Canada, anywhere, because there's no country of origin labeling law for beef and for pork.

So when we found that out, that's really, I got a little bit ahead of myself. But when we decided to start a meat company, my wife and I, like I said, I started having this idea probably over the course of a year and a half. But I would share it with my wife every few months. I would say, man, somebody could do this, this, this, and this. Somebody could do this, this, this, this. But that somebody was never me. And one morning I was taking a shower, and I heard God's voice loud and clear.

And I'm not really the type that just throws that around. But it was loud and clear in my head. And it was, you go do it. And I had chills. And I came out of the bathroom. And I went to my wife, expecting her to say, you're crazy. That's stupid. What do you know about agriculture?

You've never ran a business. We don't have any money. Kind of thinking she would talk some sense or talk it through. But I think she could feel the conviction when I came and I said, I think God just told me to start a meat company. And when I said that to her, she said, if you heard God, then I trust you. And so we just had our first baby boy. He was about three months old at that time.

And so, yeah, we came up with the name Good Ranchers, found somewhere to buy some meat, and I parked a truck in the parking lot of the mall in Waco, Texas. Was teaching myself how to run Facebook ads. This was in 2018. And it was me selling meat out of the back of a truck. And people started showing up. People started coming.

And so we went from one truck to two trucks to three trucks to four trucks. By 2020, we had 20 trucks. Wow. And were you cooking the meat or selling it raw? Raw. Wow. Yeah, just selling. We were traveling all over the country.

The pandemic happened. And that's when we – the plan was always to get online eventually. Yeah. Um, selling meat, selling anything that's perishable online is a pretty heavy, uh, you need capital to do that. Um, it's not like, um, you know, if you're selling something that's not perishable. Right. Uh, so selling perishable goods is really hard because they have to be shipped.

Um, everything has to be shipped climate controlled. Yeah, with dry ice. Yeah, with dry ice. And it's got to be stored and climate controlled. Right. So there's a lot of barriers to entry there. So the plan was to always get online eventually once we kind of built a brand, got some capital, that kind of thing.

But when it happened and the world shut down, we were like, we've got to get online now. And so we were already talking to one distribution center to ship for us, and we just pulled the trigger. We weren't ready, lost a ton of money. But because what we didn't realize is trying to ship everywhere in the lower 48 from one fulfillment center. Wasn't possible. Isn't practical.

Right. The cost of shipping, you know. Oh. So you have to set up a shipping center on each time zone. Yeah. Wow. So we have four now. Yeah.

But, yeah, that's kind of the quick story of how we got started. And like I said, when we first started, I didn't even know, because I have no background in agriculture or meat, I didn't know that there wasn't a country of origin living with law. And so for the first, 2018 and 2019, we were just buying meat from producers. And then once I started getting some purchasing power and could cut out the middleman and start going direct, that's when I learned that most of what we had been buying was coming from Mexico, just like the grocery stores and just like everything else.

And we really drew a line in the sand and said no we're gonna we want to support american farms and ranches yeah i also learned in 2019 that that almost 20,000 independent ranches go out of business every year in the u.s wow multi-generational um lots of the multi-generational that's a lot it is it is there's today there's 700,000 independent farms and ranches and the average herd size people have this idea of the meat industry they think of like factory farming and and while that does go on in the U.S. there's 700,000 independent family-owned ranches and the average herd size is only about 50 cattle. Small, little farms that they're raising cattle.

They're also raising other livestock as well. Just trying to make a living. It's a simple life. And about 20,000 of those go out of business every year for the last eight years. Jeez. Because with their no country of origin labeling law, sound like a broken record, but it's kind of our shtick. Without a country of origin labeling law,

you can just flood the market with inferior meat. Right. And it is inferior. I would do a blind taste test with what we sell against our competitors any day. And that's why we've been growing so fast. Yeah. Because when we, my wife and I, when we learned this, and around 2020 we said, okay, we want to get online.

We want to launch online. That's what we want to do. We made the decision that we're not going to sell anything that we wouldn't be proud to bring into our own home and into our guests. Love that. So I read a book back in 2012, Creativity, Inc., by John Lasseter, the founder of Pixar. And the very first page of the book, it says, quality is our business plan. And that just always resonated with me yeah and so

when we started thinking of how do we sell meat online like it's kind of easy to get and this is for anybody who sells anything online it's not hard to get somebody to buy something once but if the quality is not there they're not going to keep buying. Right. So the goal is how do you get somebody to buy something and keep buying. Repeat customer. Yeah. Yeah. We have 82% subscription rate. Holy.

That's the highest I've ever heard. Yeah. It's insane. I mean, our growth has been 2021 was our first year online. Yeah. And from 21 to 22, we grew 400% from 21 to 22. Wow. And we're up 140% over 22 year to date. Crazy. Yeah. So how much of the meat at grocery stores is imported from other countries versus domestic? 85% of the grass fedfed beef sold in the U.S. is imported.

You serious? Oh, it's terrible. Yeah. And what makes the meat quality lower in other countries versus the U.S.? Great steaks, great cattle come from great feed. And you have to feed cattle the right way for them to marble out people think that Most people think that marbling is fat. Yeah marbling is not fat. There's steaks have fat caps and stuff like that

That's not marbling marbling is intramuscular fat. So you want to get that intramuscular fat through the meat because that's what makes it tender. That's what makes it juicy. That's what makes it actually have flavor and good. And so all the imported meat that's coming, they've realized when you're talking about Brazil, which there's lots of ethical things you can talk about.

They're tearing down the rainforest to make more land, to put more cows on, because it's such a revenue stream for them. Also, ironically, the two largest meat packers in the US are Brazilian-owned. Wow. Right. So if you're wondering why there's no country of origin labeling law, I mean, it's... Yeah, sounds pretty corrupt.

Yeah, it absolutely is. So, and the same with pork. The largest, Smithfield, largest pork company is actually owned by an Asian company. So it comes from China? Yeah. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah it comes from china yeah wow that's crazy yeah i wonder man that's really concerning and i just saw a clip the other day that even though it says grass fed on it doesn't mean they were grass fed their whole life right just at one moment is that true yeah absolutely crazy yeah absolutely that's um i I mean, that's just how it works.

And again, cattle, here's another thing. Cattle can eat grains and certain kinds of grains. You shouldn't be shoving corn down their mouth the whole time. That's not healthy for them. But cattle, just like most mammals, need a variety of vegetation. And the cattle that are raised in, let's say, Nebraska, where there's cornfields and corn and stuff that just grows naturally in the wild, those cattle will get released after the harvest season

and go eat down that field. But they're eating the husk and people think that they're just eating like the corn on a cob, right? It's not even the same thing. They'll release those cattle to the field because those fields need, you know, you can only plant so many times before you've taken all the nutrients out of the ground. Cattle are an amazing animal because you can release them to a field that can't grow anymore, and they're going to eat and poop. There you go.

And then that provided. And then stomp it into the ground and bring that field back to life. Wow, that's cool. That's why it pains me that cows are so demonized as the enemy for global warming or climate change and all this stuff when 200 years ago, there was 30 million more. 200 years ago, there was estimated 60 to 90 million bison roaming in the plains of North America. Yeah. 60 to 90 million. And today, there's only about 30 million cattle for beef consumption in the U.S.

But yet, cattle are being demonized as the the problem for climate change yeah that doesn't make sense it yeah if you just do the math it doesn't make sense and they're actually amazing animals because like i said they like they're regenerative they can be put out into fields and that's how these farmers use them yeah they'll bring fields that are dead back to life i never knew that yeah Yeah. That's cool. One thing that's pretty controversial is this grass-finished labeling. Now, I noticed on your website a lot of your meat is grain-finished, right? Yes.

Just like, so we're in the wind, right? Yeah. Go to the steakhouse. Every steak in a steakhouse in 99.9% of all of Vegas and the U.S. and most of the world is going to be grain finished. Because that's how you get the marbling and the flavor. Now, you shouldn't be, there's ethical ways to finish and there's unethical ways to finish it. Lots of people have seen the kind of grotesque feedlot cows shoved into this muddy, poopy area and just disgusting and all on top of each other. Those videos are coming from PETA.

That does exist, but that's not the entire industry. There's lots of people, like I said, those 700,000 independent farms and ranchers that does exist but that's not the entire industry there's lots of people like I said those 700,000 independent farms and ranchers that still exist in the US today I go to them regularly these these are people who care for their animals they're they're they're living in the wild they're right you know and so yeah grain has been demonized again you want to talk about the corruption this there's been this whole war on grass finished grass fed beef grass finished beef is is better for you yeah um and they use these marketing claims like well it's got three times the amount of omega fatty acids

and grass-finished beef versus grain-finished beef. That's such a mislabeling claim because beef is not a significant source of omega fatty acids. Oh, man. Right. So the study actually goes like this. If beef is raised on grass its whole life, it'll have approximately 9 grams of fatty acids per serving,

of the omegas per serving. If it eats grain, it'll have about 3 or 4. So that's the 3 to 4 times. One almond has like a thousand. Wow. You see what I'm saying? Beef is not how you get your omegas. There's lots of other, and what they don't talk is the same amount of iron and creatine and vitamin K

and all the healthy nutrients of beef and protein. It's one for one the same. But they use that omega fatty acids. It's healthier. It's three times more. But beef is a significant source of that. Yeah, they just zoned in on one vitamin and made their argument, right? Yeah.

And again, because it's cheaper to raise cattle, feed costs money. It's just plain and simple and especially high quality feed right like it it costs money so you can raise cattle on grass almost for free because they just have they just and and that's why they taste so bad you have to feed. You have to fatten them up. I mean, you know, ex-pastor here, read the Bible. Like, they talk about the fatted calf, right? Like, if you're going to have a party, like, kill the fatted calf because that's the good one. If you don't get them fat, they don't have marbling and they don't taste good.

So back to the steakhouses here in Vegas and everywhere in the U.S., they're all selling grain, beef that's finished on grain. And what always is, you know, like the most expensive beef in the world right now is wagyu beef, right? They're fed grains their whole life. Like they never eat a bite of grass. Yeah, you never hear that about it. And you never hear that. Yeah.

It's weird that like American beef has become the problem for everything. Yeah. But don't get me down the rabbit hole. Well, it is weird. I think one part of it is there's certain farms that use antibiotics and vaccines, right? You chose the route of not partnering with those farms and making less money, which is why I really respect what you guys do. Yeah, because honestly, the consumer is only going to pay what they're going to pay.

But it costs a whole lot more. Yeah. It costs a whole lot more to raise the right way and to buy that way. But again, it's like what I said earlier, my wife and I, I don't want to put that in my body. I care about what I eat. We care about what, what I eat. We care about what we feed our kids. And so we said, you know what, we're going to, we're, we're going to,

we're only going to sell what we're going to eat in our own house and what we would want to give to our friends and family. Absolutely. One thing I also saw on your website, which I've never seen this before, was you lock in the price for two years on your products. Yeah, that's kind of biting us a little bit. But I really took a step back and I was like, man, these guys really care about just getting great product in people's hands. Because like I said, you could have made millions more rates and prices. My CFO talks to me about it every day.

But you know what? I grew up pretty poor. I want to be careful. Lots of people had it worse than me. I never was starving, but we weren't eating steak. Box of mac and cheese, like Pop-Tarts, deli meat and hot dogs. That's how i grew up um and so when starting a meat company it was really important to me that we we could make it as accessible as possible high quality but as accessible as possible and that's why we did the price the that's why we do the price lock because um you go to the grocery store seasonally and um something I'll, I'll use filet mignon for, for, for an example, but like there's parts of the year where you'll go and it could be $22 a pound. And then you try

to go in the holiday season and it's going to be 30, uh, 39 to $42 a pound because they know more people want to buy. So, um, it's, it's kind of hard to plan your protein around your family, especially if you have a budget and you can only spend so much. It's kind of hard to know. Well, if one day I go to the grocery store and rib eyes are $16 a pound, but then a month later I go and they're $26 a pound, well, now I can't buy the meat that I want for my family. So just factoring all of that in, we said, you know what?

We want to allow people to buy it, lock in their price, and we hope we come out on the right side of it because beef is a commodity, all meat. It's a commodity, and the price goes up and the price goes down. So we try to take positions as far ahead as we can to kind of hedge against that. We need some more hedging right now because prices are up about 50% year-to-date,

well, from this time last year to now. There's been droughts everywhere, like the smallest herd sizes ever. And because we won't bend on buying non-domestic, you know, we could slash our prices if we wanted to source from Mexico or Brazil or South America. Like, I mean, we could, like, slash our prices. But, like I said, quality is our business plan.

So what good does it do to slash our prices and then people stop buying from us because they don't like it? Quality, yeah. Like you said, 82% return rate, super high. Are there other countries that have respectable methods for their cows or do you think US is number one? US is number one.

Yeah. Yeah, US is number one. And it's crazy one yeah yeah u.s is number one and it's crazy because we actually export a lot of the higher end beef like a lot of the prime beef gets exported to other countries because they value it more than we do wow i didn't know that so people are eating american steak in other countries oh yeah wow we export um quite a bit of beef i didn't know that yeah and uh you know we that's funny i always talk about beef because when you know our logo is a cow and think good ranchers you know and when you just think meat you think steak um but um you know we sell chicken pork and seafood as well we do all

wild caught seafood now we just launched that about three weeks ago nice super excited because it's it's actually amazing but there's a saying around our company that people come for the steaks and stay for the chicken because organic chicken is just crap it really oh yeah it's like i mean and if anybody's listening and i challenge you to do a taste test. I'm telling you. Like the organic chicken, we figured out, like the man figured out how, okay, we can get people to pay more. We can raise it almost the same exact way as we've been doing it,

but we can get people to pay twice the price for it because the claim, according to the USDA, is that they have to be fed organic feed and have access to outside. So they're still putting them in pens and just shoving feed down them, down their throats, and they never go outside. They have access to outside. Oh, just access. But why are they going to leave when you're throwing all the feed in their pens?

So nothing changed. And by access, it's an 18-inch by 18-inch hole 300 yards down at the end. That's the only difference? That's their access to outside. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, you pay like double the price, too. Yeah. Now, and so with us, when you buy chicken from us,

you're getting chickens that actually go outside and are never given antibiotics, never any. We say no hormones ever. That's a misleading claim as well because it's illegal to put hormones in chicken right oh it is yeah it's been illegal for a long time and if you ever if you look at the claim on the on every label in the grocery store they'll sometimes they'll put it real big no hormones ever but yeah i see it all the time yeah but and but they're not saying there's no antibiotics ever they'll say no hormones ever and they'll put it real big to make you think and And then there's a couple of asterisks there.

And then down at the bottom it says, the USDA does not allow the use of growth-promoting hormones. Got to check the eggs I'm buying, man. There's so many different types of eggs, and they keep promoting a new, healthier one. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah.

I love that we live in a time where people are starting to care more about what they put in their body. Yeah, same. My parents, the government did a huge disservice to a couple of generations by the government. I mean, like the FDA. Yeah, the food pyramid stuff. Yeah. They did a horrible disservice and then in the 70s they came out with all this

fat is bad and fat free and then ultra processing everything right and and uh it just it just jacked up a couple of generations of people yeah you are what you eat yep and we should be eating real food that's raised right um and that's it yeah i agree this processed crap has to not stop all the canned stuff all the processed stuff it's gotta stop so is it true farm-raised fish is actually really bad for you yeah yeah um and why is that is it because it's a small um area for the fish and they're just the the yeah and they're and they're just recycling the fish through and they're putting back in and so they they're they they throwing bags of antibiotics like this antibiotic in a powder like form they throw it into the water geez and um to kill the bacteria yeah um

and the fish are swimming in it eating it drinking it oh my gosh um it's i mean it's just absorbing into them yeah i accidentally ate some farm-raised fish when i was in bolivia and i got sick for three days yeah it was terrible yeah and the color's not the same. Yeah. Yeah. So without price being a factor, what's your favorite type of steak? Angus. Angus? Upper choice Angus steak as far as, okay, well, I probably got a little too granular for you there. Sorry.

You know, to a hammer, everything's a nail. Yeah. To a meat guy it's more than a t-bone uh so but my i i get a lot of judgment here okay because i love rib eyes don't get me wrong i love rib eyes um but my favorite is an upper choice angus new york strip. Okay. Yeah. New York? Yeah. Interesting. That's a rare one. But that's, it's so good. It still has a good amount of that intramuscular marbling, but it's just a little bit leaner. And when it's raised right, when it's aged right, it's just.

Nice. Magnificent. I'll try it out. Yeah. Is it true when animals get scared or they get stressed out it affects the actual quality of the meat 100 really 100 how does it affect it uh because when when you when you get stressed your your muscles tighten up the whole idea and when a muscle uh tightens up it gets tougher especially if it tightens and contracts and tightens and contracts i mean think

about when you work out yeah you break your muscle down your rebound it tightens and contracts and tightens and contracts. I mean, think about when you work out. Yeah, yeah. You break your muscle down, you rebuild, it builds back, and it's tighter. It's firmer. So it's the same thing in animals. That's why the tenderloin is the most tender, because it's the muscle that runs across the top of the spine of the cattle. And it's also, by the way, filet mignon is the other side of the New York strip.

It's the other side of the T-bone. Oh, okay. So T-bone is the spine. The spine. And this side is the New York strip. This side is the tenderloin. Yeah. And it just runs down the spine.

And that tenderloin muscle, because cows, they dip their head and they'll bend their knees but their spine never moves so that's why it stays super tender because it it it gets the least amount of use during a life but if you stress them out if they get scared and and they're in a horrible environment they're not going to grade out they're, like, the meat can actually come out darker. Yeah, I've noticed there's some dark spots on some meat. Sometimes it's super dry. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, so that's why, going back to American farms, American ranchers, they realize it's in their best interest to raise the animals humanely, to take extreme care because the higher they grade out, the more money you're going to make. Interesting. So, man, in April I was with a ranching family in Idaho, and they were telling me the story of, it was like one of the worst winters that they've had in a long time.

And during the calving season in February, they knew there was a couple calves that were supposed to be born that night. And they went and checked for them. They weren't born. They went back around 1 in the morning, 2 in the morning, went back out to see if they were born. And they had been born, but it had been probably an hour or so. And they were just like frozen and like, they, they didn't think they were going to make it through the night, um, because it was just so cold and snowy. They pick them up, they bring

them into their living room of their house and put them by the fire and wrap them in blankets wow that's the like that's the type of agriculture raising that yeah that that we're talking about that's what you get when you buy from us yeah um and uh and again but and when people just they you know they throw like feedlot and it's bad and like no there's a right way to raise animals absolutely and there's lots of people in the u.s doing it that way love it then it's been super insightful learning more about the meat industry anything else you want to end off with or promote um yeah if you're not buying meat from good ranchers you should be we'll put a link in the description yeah um you know i can have my i'll have my team do free bacon for anybody

oh wow yeah thank you for for anybody who uh on your first purchase nice let's do it maybe promo code sean yeah let's do that put in the link yeah by the way our bacon you'll never want to eat any other bacon oh i love me some bacon so i'm excited i'm gonna send i'm gonna send i hope you i'm gonna make you get a chest freezer i'm gonna send you so much meat thanks so much man thanks for coming on for real yeah thanks for watching guys great episode check out good ranchers if you want great quality meat otherwise i'll see you next time