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Bill Niman’s Next Move

The natural-meat pioneer strikes back with a new company, BN Ranch -- and something to prove

Drew Kelly

HERE’S THE BEEF Bill Niman built one of the finest producers of naturally raised meat. Now, his name is attached to products he doesn’t believe in and refuses to buy.

It's late afternnoon in bucolic Bolinas, California, and Bill Niman has indicated that yes, he is willing to talk about his unhappy exit from the company he founded. But he has a lot going on just now. There are 78 heritage turkeys that are cackling, clucking, gobbling, and squawking as they fly into trees, jump up on fences, and generally resist the efforts of Bill and his wife, Nicolette, to herd them into their coop for the night. Meanwhile, over at the cattle barn, a grieving cow needs tending to. The cow recently lost a calf during birth, and Bill and Nicolette have a plan to unite her with another calf that has been rejected by its mother. As for the rest of the herd, it's spread out across Niman's thousand-acre ranch on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

These days, Niman's ranch is called BN Ranch, mainly for legal reasons. Under the terms of his separation from Niman Ranch Inc., he is not allowed to attach his family name to any meat-selling venture, and he fully intends to sell as much meat from the ranch as he can. In addition to heritage turkey and grass-fed beef, he and a colleague are raising goats, and he is considering a partnership with farmers who raise all-natural, free-range, pasture-bred sheep and hogs. This time around, however, he is not looking to build a big national brand like Niman Ranch. Rather, he sees BN Ranch as a demonstration farm that will prove you really can make money and get the best-tasting meat by raising animals humanely, forswearing the use of hormones and antibiotics, and following the most environmentally sound farming practices.

Many would say Niman has already proved that, at least the part about the best-tasting meat. From the mid-1970s to the middle of this decade, Niman Ranch had a reputation for producing the highest quality, most flavorful beef, pork, and lamb anywhere. It was one of the first meat producers whose offerings were featured by name on the menus of the finest restaurants and in the refrigerators of high-end markets. Today, its brand is among the most recognizable in gourmet food.

But Niman no longer has anything to do with the company that bears his name. In the summer of 2006, a controlling stake in the business was acquired by Natural Food Holdings, a subsidiary of Hilco Equity Partners, an investment firm in Northbrook, Illinois. Niman soon decided he couldn't live with the changes that the new management team was making, and so, in 2007, he left, taking with him a cow, a steer, and his remaining stock in the company, which turned out to be worthless. Earlier this year, at a special meeting, the stockholders voted to accept an offer from Natural Food Holdings to buy the rest of the company. By the time the most recent investors were paid off, there was nothing left for the early ones and the holders of common stock, including Niman.

And so it was that after spending his entire adult life building a business, revolutionizing an industry, setting a new standard for meat quality, creating a famous brand, and racking up a couple hundred million dollars in sales, Niman wound up with nothing. Indeed, you might say less than nothing: His name is now attached to products that he doesn't believe in and won't buy. "I'm not willing to eat Niman Ranch beef myself," he says.

You can't help wondering how this could have happened. Niman has pondered the question in the two years since he left the company. Sitting in the living room of the modest, four-room house that he and Nicolette share with their son, Miles Robert, and their Great Dane, Claire, he explains why he couldn't stay. As he lays out his case, there's passion in his voice but also a faint smile on his face. He seems content with his lot.

And why shouldn't he be? He lives, after all, on a pristine stretch of Northern California coastline, is engaged in work that he loves, and has a happy home life with Nicolette, an environmental activist and author 22 years his junior, and their 2-month-old son. "Do I want to miss this?" he asks at one point. "Hell, no. I want to savor it." He pauses. "But knowing what's going on in the industry, how animals are being tortured daily, and having had the platform, it's hard not to have some feelings'¦" His voice trails off. The word regret is not spoken, but it hangs in the air.

It's obvious he hasn't put Niman Ranch behind him. On the contrary, Niman bristles at the suggestion that he seems at peace with his decision to walk away. "Do I?" he says. "What I feel is bitter disappointment. And I have to take responsibility."

Niman shares responsibility for many things, not least the general awareness that the quality of the food we eat is intimately linked to the process used to grow it. But that thought hadn't yet occurred to him when he headed west from his native Minneapolis in 1968. A young man with curly dark hair and a handlebar mustache, he opposed the Vietnam War and was mainly interested in avoiding the draft, which he was able to do by becoming a schoolteacher in a remote farming community in California's San Joaquin Valley. Back then, he would never have guessed that business lay in his future. Like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's and Anita Roddick of the Body Shop, he was one of those 1960s counterculture types who wound up in business more or less by accident but, once there, discovered it could be an excellent mechanism for advancing the causes they believed in.

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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