And that’s an issue obviously because outside of the plant you have areas of the country where there’s not a lot of coronavirus, but within those plant communities, there is a lot of coronavirus because of the social living conditions. Actually Temple Grandin wrote a really good piece that came out a few days ago, where she was talking about how, her quote was, “Big isn’t necessarily bad, but big is very fragile.”Īnd I think where we’re seeing the cracks emerge in the macro supply chain on the meat side of things is a few things, (A) you have workers in plants obviously getting paid way too little, and often traveling to work together, and often staying in the same home together. We actually put them in small crates, they go on a truck, and those individual crates go into our plant, and they get individually loaded and process the birds in a small plant with about 200 employees in Jay, Oklahoma, which is about 20 miles away from us, just over the border.Īs far as you’re concerned right now, could you talk us through what is going on with the supply chain in the meat industry in terms of on the huge scale?
Which is-Īnd you guys process yourselves too, right? So what we’re doing is essentially recycling these farms, and giving our farmers and living wage for maybe in some cases, the first time in their careers. We just pay our folks about twice of the average of that as a flat rate.Īnd because they already own their housing, they don’t have a lease payment to a bank. A lot of poultry farmers participate in something called the tournament system, where the the best producing growers get paid the most, and the least get paid the least. We grow some of the birds that we produce on our farm and some of the birds on our partner farmers throughout about a 50 mile radius. And we have a bird, that’s over the course of the last 10 years, developed and been selected for flavor, for health, for having a better immune system. Our business is we have a 860-acre farm down in Decatur, Arkansas, and that’s a breeding facility where we breed heritage line birds only.
Cooks venture jay oklahoma full#
Read the full transcript of our coversation below:Ĭould you give us the context of the business? Where is it? How many people and what you do? Listen and subscribe to Eater’s Digest on Apple Podcasts. Wadiak expands on all of these issues and more in the episode below. Big agriculture can additionally serve as the source of major pandemics. Meanwhile, because processing is so concentrated, a disruption to one plant can impact the whole system. Wadiak is a co-founder of meal subscription service Blue Apron and the CEO of Cooks Venture, which raises, processes, and sells heritage, pasture-raised chickens.īecause meat has been optimized for feed conversion (versus flavor or health), the animals in our food system often can’t outlast a plant closure and have to be euthanized. This week on Eater’s Digest, industry expert Matthew Wadiak explains why our food chain is so fragile and how we’ve incentivized the wrong qualities in big agriculture for the last seventy years. Even though President Trump deemed processing plants “critical infrastructure,” at the end of April in an attempt to pressure workers and owners to keep up the pace of their operations, closures are unavoidable. The supply chain of fresh poultry, pork, and beef has been heavily impacted by the closure of meat processing plants following novel coronavirus outbreaks. Last week, almost one-fifth of Wendy’s locations were sold out of hamburgers, multiple national grocery chains limited how many fresh meat products shoppers could buy, and Shake Shack execs spoke of rising beef prices on an earnings call.
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