Crowd Cow: Beef from a local ranch to your doorstep
Feb 7, 2017, 7:20 AM | Updated: 8:02 am
Crowd Cow connects small ranchers with consumers. (Courtesy of Crowd Cow)
(Courtesy of Crowd Cow)
Of course, you can buy beef at any grocery store. But if you want to buy excellent quality beef from local ranchers in small quantities, that’s not so easy to do. That’s where Seattle start-up Crowd Cow comes in.
“Crowd Cow is a way to get beef from a small local ranch delivered straight to your door,” said Crowd Cow co-founder Ethan Lowry. “So you get all of the convenience of ordering online, but you get the quality of knowing exactly where your meat is coming from.”
“We work with Western Washington ranches and source grass-fed and grass-finished beef and Wagyu,” he said. “Normally, the way you’d get that is you’d have to go to the ranch and you’d arrange to buy a side of beef — 250 pounds of beef. With Crowd Cow you can say, ‘Hey, I want to get a few steaks. I want some ground beef.'”
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Lowry is a start-up-starting junkie who also co-created the online restaurant guide Urbanspoon.
The interesting thing about his latest venture is that you go in on a steer with a bunch of strangers. When a cow goes up online, people claim different cuts and only when every piece of meat is spoken for will you get your delivery. When the cow is claimed, an image of a cow will literally tip on the website. Lowry says it usually takes two to three days to tip a cow.
“Not only do you get to have the quantity and the cuts you were looking for, but it also finds a home for the more exotic cuts,” Lowry said. “A lot of people love rib steaks or tenderloins and those are easy. But there are also things like the heart, the tongue, the liver, the oxtail. Because of the way we gather a whole bunch of people together, there’s always somebody that really, really wants to get some of those obscure cuts.”
Crowd Cow
But they can’t legally sell every part of the cow.
“We do everything USDA so it’s all inspected and there are various rules,” Lowry said. “So there are some parts that we can’t sell. We sell everything we can. For instance, something I wish we could sell, that we can’t sell, is stomach — is tripe — which is popular in a lot of different cuisines. But you need to have a facility set up to make that consumable. The butchers that we work with aren’t set up to do that.”
Lowry says this method of crowdfunding a cow is a win-win for ranchers and consumers. This way, the owners of small ranches don’t have to worry about sales and marketing. They don’t have to form relationships with different stores and restaurants. They can sell a whole cow to Crowd Cow who does everything: the butchering, getting the cuts wrapped and shipping it out to customers.
And as an added bonus, consumers learn more about the anatomy of a cow, when you can only choose cuts from a single animal.
“When you’re buying industrial beef, when they send you a box of hangar steaks, really what they’ve done is the processor gathers an entire herd’s worth and you can get that,” Lowry said. “When you’re working with a small ranch, you can’t do that. They may only be selling 20 or 30 beef in a year. For them, the ability to take the entire animal is the difference of having a business you can sustain and having a business that goes away.”
“For the consumer, it’s kind of nice because when you go to the butcher or supermarket, you’re unlikely to find some of these obscure cuts and I think that’s a real benefit,” he said.
Right now, Crowd Cow only serves western states. But the start-up recently secured $2 million in seed funding from several investors, including former NFL star Joe Montana, to go national.
