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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Crowd Cow

Alt-Meat, Fancy Wines, and Chili’s: Black Friday/Cyber Monday Direct-to-Consumer Deals

So far, 2020 has been the year of the direct-to-consumer boom when it comes to food and beverage products, with major CPGs, restaurants, plant-based meat companies, and others setting up their own e-commerce sites to better serve homebound customers.

It follows, then, that this year’s enormous crop of Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals is chock full of offers from these companies’ sites, along with deals for meals, booze, and even groceries. And since we’re all stuck at home this year and going out to shop on Friday seems like a terrible idea as far as the pandemic is concerned, here’s a rundown of some of our favorite e-commerce food and bev deals happening over the next few days.

All Beyond Meat products on the company’s newly launched direct-to-consumer e-commerce store will be 20 percent off from 6 a.m. EST to 11:59 p.m. PST on Cyber Monday, Nov. 30. Bonus: if you’re one of the first 500 orders, you get a free Beyond Meat apron.

DoorDash just launched a gifting feature on its app that lets users send a food gift to another person. From now through Black Friday, Nov. 27, every customer that gives a gift of $20 or more gets $10 off their next order on DoorDash or Caviar.

Meat subscription service Crowd Cow is offering 20 percent off on a variety of meats and fish you can order via the Crowd Cow website. At the moment, there’s a healthy variety of shrimp, crap, steak, ground beef, cod, halibut and more available, and the company is adding new items to the sale every day. 

If you’re curious about testing out a meal kit, now might be the time to do so. A number of services are offering Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals this year. A couple notables are HelloFresh, which will give you $90 off your first five boxes, and Hungryroot, which will will offer 30 percent off your first delivery of $99 and throw in a free pack of almond chickpea cookie dough.

For all you winos, plenty of online retailers and subscription services are offering deals on vino. First-time buyers on Winc get 50 percent off their first order. Usual wines has a 21 percent discount going on orders of 12 bottles or more. Vinebox, meanwhile, is offering a 20 percent discount off its 12 Nights of Wine package through Nov. 30.

BonBowl, which makes an induction cooktop and accompanying bowl, is running a $50 off sale on Black Friday for orders placed via the BonBowl website. If you need further convincing this is a good purchase, check my full review of the device.

Finally, restaurants, especially chains, are always offering deals, and Black Friday/Cyber Monday is no exception. The folks at Delish have a solid rundown of these deals, which include chains like Peet’s Coffee, McAlister’s Deli, and, of course, Chili’s. Because it’s not a holiday if Chili’s isn’t somehow involved.

From Crowdfunding Cows to Selling Meat Subscriptions: A Conversation With Crowd Cow’s Joe Heitzberg

Half a decade later, the company is still selling to the same eco-conscious consumers and hardcore foodies, but nowadays the fast-growing online meat seller also finds what cofounder Joe Heitzberg calls ‘backyard grilling dads’ and ‘head of household females’ among its key customer groups.

This expansion into more mainstream buyers has come as the company moved away from its original crowdfund-the-cow concept to a fast-growing online business that sells small-farm beef, pork, poultry and even fish to consumers in a variety of formats, including subscriptions. Just as in the early days, Crowd Cow continues to source form small farmers and local co-ops who are sidestepping the massive industrial meat-processing complex.

I caught up with Joe last month to discuss how the company’s business has evolved over the past half-decade, the launch of their fast-growing subscription business and to see how the pandemic has changed their business.

The interview is an exclusive offering for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

Seattle Shake Shack Goes Super Local with Crowd Cow Beef

Seattle has been salivating over our forthcoming Shake Shack for months. The Emerald City may have the iconic Dick’s Burgers, mountains of local produce, and more oysters than you can shake a stick at, but something about the Danny Meyer-led chain’s cheeseburgers, crinkle fries, and ice cream concretes has created a rabid fan base for the soon-to-be restaurant. The new Shake Shack will open in Seattle’s Westlake neighborhood, smack dab in the middle of the sprawling Amazon campus, and will come with a few locally-inspired menu items. Chief among them is the Montlake Double Cut, which Seattle Met revealed today would be a double cheeseburger made with local beef sourced from Crowd Cow, topped with Just Jack cheese from Seattle institution Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, caramelized onions, and a mustard-mayo sauce on a locally made Macrina bakery bun. Shake Shack has a history of teaming up with local institutions to add regional-specific dishes to the menus of its new outposts. For example, for its Austin, Texas location, the company created a burger topped with jalapeno-cheese sausage from Texas barbecue spot Kreuz Market. However, this Seattle creation marks the first time the chain has ever made a change to its custom-blended beef patties. Honestly, we can’t wait to try the Crowd Cow burgers. (I’m a vegetarian, and I’m still excited about the partnership.) Crowd Cow is an online service that lets consumers buy craft beef (and chicken, and pork, and fish) from local farmers, then delivers it directly to their door. The Seattle-based startup recently raised $8 million to expand their network of farmers and improve their supply chain. This partnership was a savvy move on Shake Shake’s part. By partnering with a marketplace like Crowd Cow, they can feature locally raised beef from small farms without ever worrying about hiccups in their supply. If a certain farm can’t provide meat one week, Crowd Cow can always search its marketplace to source some more. By developing a burger that’s not only regionally-inspired but also made of regionally-sourced beef, the New York-based chain can attract customers who might typically avoid chain restaurants. “Shake Shack was looking to do something very particular to Seattle,” Crowd Cow co-founder Ethan Lowrey told me over the phone. Not only is their beef local, it’s also much higher quality than you’ll see in a store or restaurant — even the fancy ones. The cows in Crowd Cow’s marketplace are raised for steak, which means their meat is a superior grade. “Our secret weapon is our ground beef,” Lowrey said. “Even if you compare it with the nicest ground beef you buy in a store, it’s just night and day.” By sourcing beef from Crowd Cow, Shake Shack can capitalize on recent demands for transparent meat sourcing. As my colleague Chris Albrecht wrote a few months ago: According to The Power of Meat report, conventional meat sales were flat in 2017, while meat with special production (natural, organic, etc.) and claims about ethical animal treatment saw “dollar gains of 4.8 percent and volume growth of 5.1 percent.”  As far as we can tell, this partnership is the first time that Crowd Cow has sold their meat to a high-volume restaurant. Let’s hope the growing startup can keep up with the demand of Shake Shack-crazed Seattleites. Beyond beef, Shake Shack will also add a few local creations to its menu of concretes (basically, extra-thick milkshakes): one with seasonal pie from A La Mode Pies, one with Theo’s dark chocolate, and another with brittle made from Sea Wolf croissants. There’s no official word on the opening day for the Westlake Shack Shack, though it’s rumored to be sometime in the next few weeks. If you get to stop in and order the Montlake Double Cut, be sure to tweet us @TheSpoonTech and tell us how you liked it.

Highlights From our Future of Meat Food Tech Meetup

Last night we hosted our second food tech meetup. Folks passionate about the future of meat mingled over some excellent grub from lunch subscription service MealPal. One lucky attendee even won a Joule from our sponsor, ChefSteps!

Panelists Isaac Emery (Good Food Institute), Christie Lagally (Seattle Food Tech), and Ethan Lowry (Crowd Cow) had a really thought-provoking discussion about our relationship with meat, why industrial farming is so unsustainable, and the alternatives we can turn towards. If you missed it, here are a few topics and points that stood out to us.

P.S. Our next meetup is on June 27th and will focus on food waste solutions — mark your calendars and register to get your free tickets!

Meat labeling is frustrating.

“I hate labeling,” said Lowry. Factory-farmed meat companies can use clever labeling loopholes to make their products seem more ethical or high-quality. For example, beef can be called “grass-fed” even if it’s just fed pellets of grass in a small pen, and U.S. meat doesn’t have to disclose where it was farmed on the package. Which can be frustrating when companies like Crowd Cow try to show that their beef is truly grass-fed and local.

Of course, we also had to touch on the issue of labeling with regards to lab-grown meat. This topic has been popping up in the news as of late; from provisions in the proposed farm bill to Missouri’s declaration of what is and isn’t meat. People (and Big Beef) are wondering: will clean meat actually be considered meat?

We didn’t solve that problem in our 40-minute panel, sadly. But the panelists did agree that labeling really needed to be more accurate and transparent — for meat and meat alternatives.

Education is critical — sometimes. 

People don’t always know very much about the meat they eat. In fact, they often don’t want to. “Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made — literally,” said Emery. Which is why education is such an important part of his, and Good Food Institute’s, mission. In order to promote meat alternatives, Emery and GFI work not only to inform consumers about the negative environmental effects of animal agriculture but also about new options, such as lab-grown meat.

Education is key to Crowd Cow as well. By giving their customers information about the farm where the meat was raised, they set themselves apart from the veiled sourcing of industrial meat — and justify their higher prices.

Interestingly, education — at least on the part of the consumer — is not all that important to Lagally’s mission at Seattle Food Tech. She’s marketing her plant-based chicken nuggets to institutions, such as schools and hospitals, as a healthy, easy-to-prepare option that costs the same as the meat alternative. So when kids go through the lunch line and get her plant-based nuggets instead of ones made of chicken, the point isn’t that they necessarily care that they’re eating something vegan. In fact, the point is that they don’t care — all they’ll notice is that it tastes good.

 

So, what’s the future of meat?

Lowry summed it up best when he said that the future of meat would be “complex.” If we learned anything at this meetup, it’s that there are a myriad of new ways to create and purchase meat (and meat alternatives), all of which are relatively new. (And, in the case of lab-grown meat, yet to be on the market.)

So as unsatisfying an answer as it is, the truth is that we don’t know what the future of meat will look like. But what we do know is that there will be a lot more options than there are now: more (and better, and cheaper) plant-based meat products, higher-quality meat with transparent supply chains, and, hopefully, clean meat as well.

    That’s a pretty rosy view of the future. But if we can make these alternatives convenient, affordable, and good-tasting, people will hopefully turn towards them and the amount of factory farmed meat will fall. “If we build it, they will come,” concluded Lagally. And that’s exactly what they’re working to do.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the meetup! See you on June 27th. 

Crowd Cow Beefs Up with $8M, Adds Ashton Kutcher as Investor

Crowd Cow, the online service that allows consumers to buy craft meat direct from independent farms, announced today that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Madrona Venture Group and had participation from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures as well as existing investors Joe Montana (yes, that Joe Montana) of Liquid 2 Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Crowd Cow to $10 million.

According to a press announcement, the new funding will help the company add ranches and farms to its platform, improve its supply chain and go “all-in on the search for new and unique flavors in categories like Craft Beef, Pastured Chicken, Heritage Pork, and beyond.”

Crowd Cow works by having “steakholders” purchase various cuts of a specific cow. Once the entire cow is purchased, the cow is “tipped” and then goes on to be processed, and its meat is packaged, frozen, and shipped directly to buyers.

I spoke with Crowd Cow founders Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry who said that they are creating this new type of communication loop. Crowd Cow is telling consumers exactly where their meat is coming from, and in turn, customer are providing feedback about the product directly back to the ranchers. Something the ranchers have never experienced before.

It’s transparency like this that consumers are looking for in their meat purchases. According to The Power of Meat report, conventional meat sales were flat in 2017, while meat with special production (natural, organic, etc.) and claims about ethical animal treatment saw “dollar gains of 4.8 percent and volume growth of 5.1 percent.” Millennials in particular like this type of special production, ensuring a market for Crowd Cow in years to come.

In addition to sourcing, Crowd Cow is doing work on the technology side with the supply chain, creating a logistics network that is able to process the meat near where the cow is raised, yet deliver it around the country. They even monitor weather at their customers’ various locations so that their algorithms can determine the proper amount of ice needed to keep the meat from spoiling on any doorstep.

Crowd Cow’s combination of small connection with farms and large scale distribution is partly what attracted investors. Heitzeberg and Lowry actually got a cold investment inquiry email from Kutcher, who grew up in Iowa and had worked as a butcher at one point. Interestingly, this also isn’t the only food-related investment for Kutcher, who is also an investor in the June Oven.

This type of conscientious meat capitalism is catching on. Just north of Seattle-based Crowd Cow is Vancouver, Canada’s Meatme, which also connects meat buyers with local ranchers.

Crowd Cow has also been expanding beyond beef in recent months, adding chicken, pork and seafood (though the seafood page appears to be down as of this writing). And on Memorial Day, the company is offering Wagyu beef from Japan in a special event.

Speaking of events, Lowry will be at The Spoon’s Future of Meat event tonight in Seattle. Look for a wrap up of what he and all our panelists have to say in a post here later this week.

Podcast: Tipping Cows With Crowd Cow’s Ethan Lowry

Here’s one thing you probably haven’t tried: crowdfunding a cow.

But now you can with Seattle area startup Crowd Cow. The brainchild of former Urban Spoon cofounder Ethan Lowry, Crowd Cow lets backers buy their choice of meat by crowdfunding local farm raised cattle one cow at a time.

In this episode, I talk to Ethan about how he got the idea for Crowd Cow, how he sees the retail market for meat changing and how Crowd Cow could evolve to become a platform for products other than beef.

Have a listen:

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

Q&A With Crowd Cow’s Ethan Lowry

Used to be if you wanted to buy meat directly from a farmer without a middleman, you’d have to go find a farmer to sell you a side of beef.  The only problem is, not many of us have a giant freezer to hold hundred of pounds of meat let alone time to drive out and find a farmer.

Enter Crowd Cow. The company makes directly sourcing meat from a farmer much easier through crowdfunding a cow (or technically a heifer or steer) with others online.

The company was founded after former UrbanSpoon founder Ethan Lowry heard a friend rave about the beef he had bought directly from a farmer. Before long, he half-joked with his eventual co-founder Joe Heitzenberg that they should crowdfund a cow.

They eventually did just that and, when to their surprise it worked, Crowd Cow was born.

We decided to catch up with Ethan to ask him a few questions about his company that is trying to bring meat directly to the consumer through crowdsourcing.

Wolf: Grass fed beef delivery services tend to serve local geographies. How do you plan to scale Crow Cow as you go nationwide?

Lowry: Giving consumers across the country access to high-quality, sustainably and ethically-raised beef is exactly what Crowd Cow aims to do. With the rancher relationships we have today, we can reach customers in 14 states. But we’re excited to be national by the end of this summer. To make that happen we need to bring in new ranchers, which is a time-intensive process since we need to do very thorough vetting. We also need to build fulfillment centers across the US so we can efficiently reach customers in different markets.

Wolf: Why use a crowdfund mechanism for each cow? Does it lead to more engagement? 

Lowry: One thing that makes Crowd Cow unique is that we sell the entire animal from a ranch. By crowdfunding each cow, we’re giving consumers exactly what they want, and doing it in a way that doesn’t waste any part of the beef. It’s a nose-to-tail selling experience that you won’t find elsewhere. Some people just love strip steaks and tenderloins, other people just want roasts, and others are really excited to get harder-to-find cuts like oxtail, heart, kidney and tongue.

It gives our customers a sense of community too. It’s not just a one-off purchase they’re making. They, along with their friends and family, can get together and support a particular farmer with a particular story. Also, it’s a bit of a game to watch a cow move towards tipping, the term we use when an entire animal has been purchased. It encourages people to rally their friends and family, buy up shares, and make sure the cow tips.

It’s also important to point out that the small, independent farms we work with can only sell an entire animal. Industrial farms producing thousands and thousands of animals can have them slaughtered and then distribute all the tenderloins to one place and then all the hanger steaks to another. Our farmers don’t work with massive wholesale buyers who do this type of piece-by-piece distribution. They rely on buyers like us, or local butchers and restaurants that can really use all the parts of the animal. We respect this process. We know our ranchers are great at raising delicious beef and we enjoy the challenge of buying the whole animals and finding innovative ways to sell them to consumers.

Wolf: As you go national, do you see regional or even local crowdfund campaigns? (and does that mean the consumer in a specific geography only sees cows that are being crowdfunded in their local geography?)

Lowry: We can’t wait to have partners across the country so we can offer customers locally-raised beef. We’d love to offer California customers California beef and Chicago customers Midwestern beef.

But beyond that, we want customers to experience beef in the same way that you would a fine wine. Beef raised on one ranch actually tastes different from beef raised on another ranch. The flavor comes from what it grazed on during its life, the particular breed it came from (like Angus or Hereford or Wagyu), and importantly the care and treatment it received. It’s exciting to sample beef from different ranchers and find the one you absolutely love.

Crowd Cow is about great-quality beef from the best farmers, but it’s also about experiencing different types of beef and finding your favorites. Featuring regional farms will help us achieve this.

Wolf: Grass fed beef is around 2% nationally, but growing fast. Is your growth a result of this trend as well as the movement towards newer ways to buy food more locally (the Portlandia consumer as you define it)

Lowry: There’s certainly growing interest in understanding how our food is produced. Part of that is consumers being better educated about the downsides to both the animals and ranchers that comes with industrial farming practices. Another part of that is understanding how the food we eat truly impacts our health. When you realize that much of the meat you find at your local supermarket has been pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics, most people would think twice about eating it.

We’re definitely benefiting from this overall food supply chain awareness. Because we partner with farmers that follow ethical and sustainable practices, customers can have confidence in what they’re eating, and it’s a primary reason our customers are telling us that they shop from us. Now, the reason they keep coming back is because this beef happens to be delicious.

I should also note that not all of our beef is exclusively grass fed. We’re certainly open to working with farmers that grain-finish their beef — which means they feed their cattle grain to fatten them up before slaughter. Provided they aren’t using hormones or antibiotics, crowding their animals into pens, or otherwise acting in ways they would ashamed to admit to customers. In fact, we work with some amazing wagyu beef farmers that grain-finish their cattle because it results in a beautifully marbled beef.

What we focus on is transparency. We think people want and deserve to know where their food is coming from, and that supermarket labels are misleading and insufficient. When we ask our customers what really gets them excited about beef from Crowd Cow, it has much more to do with this aspect of our business. Customers care where their food comes from, and we can give them that insight.

Wolf: As consumers move towards local food purchasing enabled through technology-driven marketplaces, how does this look in the future?

Lowry: As consumers, we’ve gotten used to having more and more information about the products we buy, so we can make more knowledgeable decisions and tradeoffs. Digital marketplaces are a fantastic way to get that information. A two-inch label on a grocery store shelf just can’t offer that kind of help.

Wolf: Part of the charm of buying local is getting out and talking to local producers at farmer’s markets, local butchers, etc. Have you thought about ways to keep that alive since you are moving this process online?

Lowry: Absolutely! When you come to our site one of the very first things you’ll see is a complete feature on the farmer whose beef we’re selling that day. You get a video tour of the ranch so you can see their pasture and their grazing herd. We present detailed background about the farmer, their practices and the beef itself.

The digital space is an amazing place to engage with people just like you who may live thousands of miles away. You don’t usually see customers talking to each other at a farmer’s market about favorite recipes, grilling techniques, or even the tastiness of different cattle breeds. But with an online community, we can create this one-to-one experience.

Wolf: One of your local Seattle startup peers, ChefSteps, is looking to build a direct-to-consumer steak marketplace.  Is the market still nascent and big enough to lift all boats, or do you see competition rising?

Lowry: Getting the best quality, sustainably and ethically raised beef delivered to a consumer’s door is quite a bit easier said than done. We let you order just the cuts and quantity you are looking for, from the farm you choose, delivered to you. We have to be unbelievably diligent about who we work with and how we assess their practices, we have to efficiently package and deliver each custom order, and fuel a growing community. That’s no easy task.

Right now we’re not seeing anyone offering what we are, and we know (from hard experience) that it will be difficult for anyone else to do this.

That said, I think other companies talking about the importance of high-quality meat is great for us, and consumers, by simply raising awareness. Our biggest challenge is to get the word out so people realize they have a choice.

Wolf: We focus a lot on the future of the kitchen. Have you thought about ways to leverage growing interest in cooking tech and new technology in the kitchen for your business of crowdfunding cows?

Lowry: Each and every Crowd Cow beef cut is vacuum-sealed in a food safe pouch and then flash frozen. At a very basic level, this makes it easy to keep fresh in your freezer until you’re ready to cook it up. But, this is also really great for sous vide cooking. Customers are always sending us pictures of their sous-vide-prepared meat and it looks amazing.

As the cost of sous vide devices comes down and the features and quality get better and better, I’m sure more customers will want to try it out. At this point an Anova is less than $150, and it’s an amazing little machine. We’re definitely excited to help people learn more about sous vide and how it can help them prepare restaurant-quality beef at home.

I also think new food tech innovations like June, the “smart” oven, align beautifully with what we’re about. This is a device that’s designed to give you high-quality food, coupled with convenience and simplicity. That’s almost exactly what we’re trying to do with Crowd Cow — bring you the best quality beef, with the convenience of ordering online and home delivery.

Wolf: Can you see extending Crowd Cow into other forms of locally produced food?

Lowry: Definitely. There’s a ton of demand for ethically and sustainably raised meat. Almost since day one we’ve had customers asking us for pork, chicken, lamb, fish and other more exotic meats.

Right now however, we’re hyper-focused on finding fantastic beef farmers across the US. Once we’ve nailed that, we’ll work with farmers to offer other great products.