Back at the BN Ranch, I have just sunk my teeth into what is easily the best hamburger I have ever tasted -- so big, juicy, and flavorful that I wouldn't dream of spoiling it by adding, say, ketchup. The meat, of course, is from a cow the Nimans raised. It's actually part of a test to see how grass-fed beef tastes when you don't fatten up the cow on grain but instead allow her to graze an extra year. Bill is having a hamburger, too, but Nicolette passes. She's a vegetarian.
"One thing we wanted was the herd," Nicolette is saying, referring to the terms of Bill's departure from Niman Ranch. "They were descendants of the six in the gunnysacks."
"We offered an above-market price," Bill says. "Then we realized they had the perception we'd do anything to get the cows."
"What they wanted in the separation agreement was outrageous," says Nicolette. "They wanted Bill to never use the phrase Niman Ranch and to fine him $25,000 every time he did. We told their lawyer, 'We won't sign this deal. Take any cattle you want.' They took them all, except for an old cow and an old steer."
As I savor my burger, I'm thinking that the grass-fed beef experiment has obviously been a success. Apparently, the other experiments have been successful as well. I haven't sampled Niman's goat meat, but I've been told that the goat tastes like the best lamb you have ever had, only better. As for the turkeys, Niman sold about 50 of them at Thanksgiving through Bi-Rite Market, a specialty food store in San Francisco. Reports from customers were uniformly glowing.
Such high quality does not come cheap. Bi-Rite charges $105 for a 15-pound BN Ranch turkey; supermarket turkeys go for $15 to $25. BN Ranch goat meat runs from $14 to $26 a pound, significantly more than similar cuts of lamb. The beef won't be available in stores for another year or so, when about 30 steers will come of age, and so we don't know what the meat will cost. But having tasted the hamburger, I wouldn't be at all reluctant to spend whatever a retailer wanted to charge for it.
The question is, Can BN Ranch ever sell enough meat to be profitable when it costs so much, even if it is the best-tasting meat in the world? Niman isn't worried. "I believe there's a superpremium, quality-conscious upscale customer who will recognize the value and be willing to pay for it," he says. At the moment, most customers are restaurants. "Chez Panisse took six goats this week, Oliveto, Pizzaiolo," Niman says, dropping the names of some of the finest restaurants in the Bay Area.
But Niman wants more than to become the meat of choice in high-end restaurants. "I'm really trying to change things," he says. "We want to show what can be done on small homesteads and farms. The other thing is to have a viable, income-generating business, because we can't afford to fund operating losses with our own money, and I don't want to do it with other people's money this time. And any model for other ranchers and farmers to copy has to be income generating. So for both those reasons, we need to be financially successful."
And what could prevent him from being financially successful? "The only thing would be growing too fast and trying to get too big," he says. Which is, of course, exactly what happened the last time.
By the time McConnell and Hurlbut showed up in 1997, the business had been around for more than 20 years, sales were approaching $2 million, and Niman was desperate for help. "I was killing myself trying to do everything," he says. "Feeding the animals. Taking them to slaughter. Working with the butchers and the packers. Calling customers. Doing deliveries." He was the rare farmer who had a direct hand in every phase of the process -- from birthing the calves to butchering the meat to interacting with some of the greatest chefs in the country -- and the stress was taking a toll.
Aside from helping Niman carry the load, McConnell and Hurlbut brought a new dimension to the business. They weren't ranchers. They were businessmen, and what particularly fascinated them was the opportunity to create a nationally recognized brand in meat. Hurlbut had seen Nestlé do it with coffee. McConnell had access to the capital needed to pull it off.
Their arrival coincided with a development that would transform the company. Up until then, Niman Ranch had been known almost exclusively for its beef. Although it also sold some lamb and pork -- mainly in response to requests from chefs -- they were a sideline. Recently, however, Niman had begun working with an Iowa hog farmer, Paul Willis, who had his own vision of reviving traditional hog farming in the Midwest, where hundreds of thousands of family-owned hog farms had gone out of business or been absorbed into massive, indoor pig factories. Willis came to Niman looking for help. They soon began putting together a network of midwestern farmers who, like Willis, raised pigs the old-fashioned way.
The program was in its infancy when Niman Ranch got a call one day in 1998 from Whole Foods Market. "They said they wanted to buy pork from us," McConnell recalls. "We said, 'We're a beef company.' They said, 'No, you're actually the largest supplier of free-range pork in America.' I think we had 15 hog farmers at the time. We just looked at ourselves. It was the business opportunity of a lifetime."
