Crowd Cow Redefines the High End of the Meat Market

By Ronald Holden

Remember UrbanSpoon? Wacky idea that you could load a whole city's worth of restaurants onto an iPhone app, add geo-location and crowd sourcing, and it would display the nearest teriyaki joints or pizza parlors as well as their ratings. Developed by a young guy named Ethan Lowry (at right in photo) who sold it to Barry Diller's IAC Interactive for a gazillion dollars. (UrbanSpoon eventually turned into Zomato, became rotten, and disappeared.) But the next thing you know, Lowry and a buddy, Joe Heitzeberg (at left in photo), came up with another wacky idea (brilliant, in retrospect) that foodies, picky eaters and even animal rights advocates would be willing to crowd-fund the purchase of their own beef. Not anonymous chunks and slices, not even from the best butchers, but the whole animal. Crowd Cow, they called it.

It wouldn't really be a cow, of course, but a steer. Still, for Lowry and Heitzeberg, the concept was a risk. Assuming they could even find a rancher who was raising his cattle to their exacting standards, the market isn't set up to sell one head of beef at a time. But they went ahead anyway.

Understandably nervous; no one had ever tried to crowd-fund the purchase of a single animal. They hit "Send" on their email to Facebook friends and people who had expressed an interest in their venture and waited. Within 24 hours, their cow had "tipped" --sold out.

That was less than two years ago. Today, Crowd Cow sells 150 animals a month. Not just the prime cuts, either. What goes fastest, it seems, are the bits that conventional butchers don't bother with: oxtail, for example, and tongue, as well as soup bones and marrow bones. "We don't get the cheeks from all our butchers, but sell those, too, when possible," Lowry told me.

They're working with dozens of producers, ranging from purebred, grass-finished wagyu to grain-finished angus cattle. "Some farm's beef is rare and only offered once per year, and for others we might have some available every other week."

It would be bad enough if "grass-fed" really did mean that the cattle ate grass growing in a pasture. But "grass-fed" does not mean "pasture-raised." Pasture is out there. In here, in the barns, they use grass pellets. Pellets that don't have anywhere near the right kind of nutrition.

"The reality is that American beef is a massively consolidated industry, with just a few players," Lowry points out, "producing 80% of what you find in stores and restaurants."

A growing number of consumers began turning to grass-fed beef to avoid buying meat from feedlot cattle and factory farms. "But as grass-fed beef skyrocketed in popularity," Lowry maintains, "these same large producers have jumped on the bandwagon to offer a product that meets the letter of the law without a lot of respect for the spirit."

Sample from crowdcow.com

Lowry explains that beef--technically grass-fed and grass-finished--is in fact coming from concentrated feedlots where the cattle are fed from troughs of manufactured grass pellets. "Large scale farms are talking about how to dope their grass with nitrogen," he says, and undernourished cattle are getting sold to the consumer at a premium because they have the "grass fed" label.

This probably isn't what most people think they're signing up for. But if you're buying "grass-fed" beef and you can't name the farmer or locate the farm on a map, it's a good bet you're getting pellets, not pasture.

Of course, this isn't the only kind of grass-fed beef on the market. "Many independent farmers with real expertise and commitment to their land are raising cattle -- and finishing them -- on healthy grass," Lowry says. "The key is to know where your meat is actually coming from, right down to the name of the farmer and the location of the ranch."

On Lopez Island, where there have been several consecutive years of drought (these winter rains come too heavy, too late), a producer of grass-finished Purebred Wagyu, rancher Scott Meyers, has been capitalizing on an unusual forage -- a weed called reed canary grass -- to extend his growing season with nutrient-dense grass.

Another grass-finished beef farm Crowd Cow works with is Harlow Cattle Co. on the Camas Prairie in Spanaway. It's run by solo-operator and second-generation farmer Becky Harlow Weed, who emphasizes prairie preservation because, as she likes to say, ranchers must be "grass growers first." Because she keeps her Angus-Hereford herd in balance with the native grasslands ("I never let my cows overgraze," she says), her ranch is able to support a range of flora and fauna, including some species that have become endangered because their habitats have been so decimated by development.

But beef -- even the best beef -- isn't for everyone. Crowd Cow needed more. Fish? Pork? Maybe, down the line. For now, they're settled on chickens.

Their newest product is called Pasturebird. Raised on a farm outside Murrieta, California, two hours from Los Angeles, the Pasturebird chickens are part of a larger agriculture and livestock ranch that incorporates humane practices, itself a crowd-funded operation.

The price is steep, but only if you're used to buying cheap, tasteless birds from the supermarket. A three-pack of Pasturebird chickens is $60. "You can taste the difference," says Lowry, who has visited the farm and expresses admiration for the work of its CEO, Paul Greive. "It's chicken as it tasted 100 years ago," the website contends. (Hmm. How would anyone alive today know?) Hyperbole aside, "Pasturebird is one of the best poultry products I've had in a long time," says Eric Klein, VP Culinary at Wolfgang Puck. If all you've ever eaten is grocery store chicken, or, worse, KFC, "the first bite of Pasturebird chicken will be nothing less than magical," the company says. Pasturebird Farm birds are higher in Vitamin A, D, E, Omega-3, and lower in fat than what you can buy at the store. They're never given vaccines or antibiotics -- only locally-milled feed and as much grass and bugs as they please, because their whole lives are spent outside.

A major issue for Crowd Cow has always been the supply chain. They work with USDA approved slaughterhouses, and only deal with one animal (or flock of birds) at a time, but that still means freezing, wrapping, and shipping. The product itself is priced roughly the same as the butcher counter at Whole Foods. But there's no inventory problem because they don't ship anything until the whole cow has been sold. Great for individuals, terrible for restaurants, though.

"We don't want to sell to restaurants as a business," co-founder Heitzeberg told Forbes magazine last year. "It would purely be a marketing thing. It's business 101. Focus. We provide a high-touch experience with a high level of service. A restaurant calls you at 8 o'clock on a Friday and says we're out of T-bones."

March 2018

 Ronald Holden is a Northwest native who's been writing about local food for over 40 years. His latest book, Forking Seattle, is available on Amazon.com. He blogs at Cornichon.org and contributes often to Forbes.com.