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

We want to get online.

We want to watch 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 give it to 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 has always resonated with me.

Welcome back to the show, guys.

Digital Social Hour.

I'm your host, as always, Sean Kelly.

Got 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.

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.

Yeah, this is this is really cool.

Like

never 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 f I n I had never planned to be an entrepreneur, 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.

It's uh, yeah, that's cool.

But, um, you know,

you know my story.

I was a, 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 started, 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.

Right.

But I started asking God to give me something that I could do

to make income that 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 it's a full-time job but just for me that just that seed started growing and about over over a year and a half or so I kept having this idea of a meat company and I kept and I kept thinking man somebody could do somebody could start a meat company and and partner with farms and actually bring like quality to to american families

because at that time the really only big player was almaha steak and um i don't know if anybody from omaha stakes is going to listen to this but they sell a bunch of crap yeah um and like it's super it's low quality oh very low quality um

they don't disclose the grade of it they have their own they have their own grading system

that's sketchy yeah yeah 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.

So you can buy stuff in the grocery store that has an American flag sticker on it, and

that says

product of USA.

Yeah, and

it can come straight from Mexico.

It could come straight from a feedlot in Mexico or Brazil or Australia or New Zealand,

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 day I was, 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 like it was like 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.

Those are, you know.

kind of thinking she would like 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 wow 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 were.

The plan was always to get online eventually.

Selling meat, selling anything that's perishable online is is pretty heavy.

You need capital to do that.

It's not like

you're selling something that's not perishable.

Selling perishable goods is really hard because they have to be shipped.

Everything has to be shipped climate controlled.

Yeah, with dry ice.

Yeah, with dry ice.

And it's got to be stored in climate controlled.

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 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 to to ship for us and we just pulled the trigger we weren't ready

lost a ton of money but but wow because

what we didn't realize is trying to ship everywhere in the the lower 48 from one fulfillment center wasn't possible isn't isn't practical The cost of shipping, you know.

So you have to set up a shipping center on each time zone.

Yeah.

Wow.

So we have four now.

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 label law.

And so for the first 2018 and 2019, we were just buying meat from

producers.

And

then

once I started getting some buying, 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 want to support American farms and ranches.

I also learned in 2019 that

that almost 20,000 independent ranches go out of business every year in the US wow multi-generational

lots of them 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 and they think of like factory farming and and while that does go on

in the US

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

stick, you know.

Without a country of origin labeling law, you can just flood the market with undercut them 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 about in 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.

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.

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.

So the goal is how do you get somebody to buy something and keep buying?

So repeat customer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We have an 82% subscription rate.

Holy, that's the highest I've ever heard.

Yeah,

it's insane.

I mean, our growth has been

2021, it 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-fed 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.

Marbling is not fat.

Steaks have fat caps and stuff like that.

That's not marbling.

Marbling is intramuscular fat.

So

you want

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 these,

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 we're because it's such a revenue stream for them.

Also,

ironically, the two largest meat packers in the U.S.

are Brazilian-owned.

Wow.

Right.

So if you're wondering why there's no country of origin labeling law, I mean, it's...

Yeah, it sounds pretty corrupt.

Yeah, it absolutely is.

So, and the same with pork.

The largest, Smithville, largest pork company is actually owned

by an Asian company.

So 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, I mean, that's just

how it works.

And again,

cattle,

here's another thing.

Cattle can eat grains in

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 who live that are raised in, let's say, Nebraska, where there's like cornfields that can corn and stuff that just grows naturally in the wild,

Those cattle will get released once after the harvest season and go eat down that field.

But they're eating the husk.

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, they're you can only plant so many times before you've taken all the nutrients out of the ground.

Cattle are amazing animals because you can release them to a field that can't grow anymore and they're going to eat and

there you go.

And then dop you said it.

And then stomp it into the ground and bring that field back to life.

Wow.

That's cool.

Yeah,

that's why it pains me that cows are so demonized as the enemy for global, you know, like 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.

60 to 90 million.

And today, there's only about 30 million cattle for beef consumption in the U.S.

So, but yet cattle are being demonized as the problem for climate change.

Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

Yeah, if you just do the math, it doesn't make sense.

And they're actually amazing animals because, like I said,

they're regenerative.

They can be put out into fields, and that's how these farmers use them.

They'll bring fields that are dead back to life.

I never knew that.

Yeah.

It'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 US 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.

And everyone's lots of people have seen

you know, the kind of grotesque feedlot cows shoved into this, you know, just muddy, poopy area and just disgusting and all on top of each other.

That's

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 still exist in the U.S.

today.

I go to them regularly.

These are people who care for their animals.

They're living in the wild.

And so yeah, grain has been demonized.

Again, you want to talk about the corruption.

There's been this whole war on

grass-fed beef, grass-finished beef is better for you.

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,

that it'll have approximately nine

grams of fatty acids per service,

of the omegas per serving.

If it eats grain, it'll have about three or four.

So that's the three to four 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 like 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 isn't significant source of that Yeah, they they just zoned in on one vitamin and made that their argument, right?

Yeah, and again because it's cheaper to raise cattle Feed costs money like 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 them you have to fatten them up I mean

you know ex-pastor here read the Bible like they talk about the fatted calf right yeah like if you're gonna have a party like kill the fatted calf because that's the good one if you don't get them 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 me is, you know, like the the most expensive beef in the world right now is wagging.

Waggy, right?

Waggy beef, right?

They're fed grains their whole life.

They never eat a bite of grass.

Yeah, you never hear that about it.

And you never hear that.

It's weird that 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 it's because honestly the consumer is only going to pay what they're going to pay um but it costs a whole lot more yeah to it costs a whole lot more to raise uh the right way and to to buy that way um but again um it's like what i said earlier my wife and i I don't want to put that in my body.

Like, I care about what I eat.

We care about what we feed our kids.

And so we said, you know what?

gonna, we're we're gonna

we're only gonna sell what we're gonna 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 like, 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

raising 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.

A box of mac and cheese, like Pop-Tarts,

deli meat and hot dogs.

That's how I grew up.

And so when starting a meat company, it was really important to me that we could make it as accessible as possible, high quality, but as accessible as possible.

And that's why we did the price, that's why we do the price lock because you go to the grocery store seasonally and

something,

I'll use filet mignon 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

$39 to $42 a pound

because they know more people want to buy it.

So

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 Ribbey's are $16 a pound and 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,

you know, we hope we come out on the right side of it because

beef is a commodity, all meat, you know, it's a commodity, and the price goes up and the price goes down.

And 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.

Yeah.

You know, 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 we could slash our prices if we wanted to source from Mexico or from 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 U.S.

is number one?

U.S.

is number 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.

Oh, I didn't know that.

So people are eating American steak in other countries?

Oh, yeah.

We export quite a bit of beef.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's funny.

I always talk about beef because,

you know, our logo is a cow and you think good ranchers.

And when you just think meat, you think steak.

But,

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.

So I'm super excited

because

it's actually amazing.

But there's a saying around our company that people come for the the steaks and stay for the chicken because organic chicken is just crap.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

It's like, I mean, and if anybody's listening, 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 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 pins 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?

Why are they going to leave when you're throwing all the feed in their pins?

And by access, 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, and 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.

Oh, it is?

Yeah, yeah.

It's been illegal for a long time.

And

if you look at the claim

on every label in the grocery store, sometimes they'll put it real big.

No hormones ever.

Yeah, I see it all the time.

Yeah.

But they're not saying it's no antibiotics ever.

They'll say no hormones ever.

And they'll put it real big to make you think.

And then there's a couple asterisks there that say, and then down at the bottom, it says, the USDA does not allow the use of growth-promoting hormones.

Like,

yeah, gotta check the eggs I'm buying, man.

So many different types of eggs, and they keep promoting like a new, healthier one.

Yeah, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, I mean,

yeah, it's

I love that we live in a time where people are starting to care more about what they put in their body, yeah, like

my parents, they like 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.

And

it just jacked up

a couple of generations of people.

You are what you eat.

Yep.

And we should be eating.

real food that's raised right

and that's it.

This processed crap has to

stop.

All the canned stuff, all the processed stuff, it's got to stop.

So is it true farm-raised fish is actually really bad for you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why is that?

Is it because it's a small area for the fish and they're just...

Yeah, and they're just recycling the fish through and they're putting them back in.

And so

they throwing bags of antibiotics, like this antibiotic and a powder, like form, they throw it into the water to

kill the bacteria.

Yeah.

And the fish are swimming in it,

eating it, drinking it.

Oh my gosh.

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.

Yeah, and the color's not the same.

No.

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 an ale.

Yeah.

To a meat guy,

it's more than a T-bone.

So, but my

Get a lot of judgment here, okay?

Because I love ribeyes.

Don't get me wrong.

I love ribeyes.

But my favorite is an upper choice Angus New York strip.

Okay.

Yeah.

New York.

Yeah.

Interesting.

It's a rare one.

But that's it's it's so good.

It's it's it's 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.

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 that?

Because

when you get stressed,

your muscles tighten up.

The whole idea, and when a muscle tightens up, it gets tougher, especially if it tightens and contracts and tightens and contracts.

I mean, think about when you work out,

you break your muscle down, you rebel, 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 bignon is the other side of the New York strip, is the other side of the T-bone.

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 gets the least amount of use during life.

But if you stress them out, if they get scared

and

they're in a horrible environment,

they're not going to grade out.

The meat can actually come out darker.

Interesting.

Yeah, I've noticed there's some dark spots on some meat.

Sometimes it's super dry.

Yep.

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 raise the, to take extreme care, because the higher they grade out, the more money you're going to make.

Interesting.

So,

man, I was

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 one in the morning, two 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.

They didn't think they were going to make it through the night

because it was just so cold and snowy.

They'd pick them up, they'd bring them into their living room of their house

and put them by the fire and wrap them in blankets.

That's the type of agriculture raising that

we're talking about.

That's what you get when you buy from us.

And again, but and when people just they you know they throw like feed lot 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.

Ben, it's been super insightful learning more about the meat industry.

Anything else you want to end off with or promote?

Yeah, if you're not buying meat from GoodRanchers.com, you should be.

We'll put a link in the description.

Yeah.

You know what?

I can have my

I'll have my team do free bacon for anybody.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, free bacon for anybody who 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 going to send you, I hope you're going to 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.