A rare romance in the meat business.
Love — and grass-fed steaks — in a sleepy Marin ranching town.
Claire Herminjard did not want to date a meat guy.
When she met David Evans in 2010, she was looking for business advice. He was the 37-yearold owner of Marin Sun Farms, an established brand of pastureraised meats he had founded more than a decade earlier. She was a 26-year-old San Franciscan who was considering leaving behind a tech career to launch her own organic pasture-raised beef company — and she had a lot of questions.
They met at his ranch, one of several founded by his greatgrandfather in 1939 in what is now the Point Reyes National Seashore. The two felt a flash of connection when they realized how much their ideals about agriculture, and life, lined up. They probably even fell in love that day. But the timing wasn’t right because Herminjard had made it a rule: Do not get involved with a meat guy.
“It’s a very male-dominated industry, and I wanted to be taken seriously,” she says. “I was an entrepreneurial woman who was out there trying to be on my own.”
It wasn’t until last year, long after Herminjard had gotten her Mindful Meats business off the ground, that she and Evans started dating. Barely a week ago, he proposed, officially making them one of the Bay Area’s most unlikely power couples, as heads of two potentially competing meat companies.
“Claire was never far from my mind, even though it took five more years for us to come together,” says Evans, whose pale blue eyes fix on Herminjard as he talks with a deliberate, deep cadence.
Herminjard’s Mindful Meats has a line of beef in retail stores and restaurants around California; it is also the sole beef supplier for Stanford Health Care. Marin Sun Farms sells pasture-raised beef, pork, goat, lamb, chicken and eggs produced by several local ranchers, at retail shops in Oakland and Point Reyes Station and multiple wholesale accounts. In 2014, the company took over a Petaluma slaughterhouse that now processes animals for 100 local companies.
Yet with a steadfast idealism that they share, they see themselves not as competitors but as fighting the good fight to get food from local ranchers to the community.
“We’re competing with Tyson. We’re competing with Cargill. We’re competing with these bigger brands out there,” says Herminjard.
At least for the moment, Herminjard still has her own apartment in nearby Point Reyes Station, where her company is based, but she and Evans spend most of their free time on his 400-acre ranch with their five dogs — three are his, two are hers, “Brady Bunch”-style — and about 600 laying hens.
Herminjard, now 32, has shiny dark hair and a pretty, dimpled smile. Her expressive eyebrows rise and fall as she recalls how they first met, which started with a screening process. At the time, a lot of people wanted to get into the sustainable meat business, and too many of them wanted Evans’ ear. He was a pioneer in the local movement, as the first, for example, to sell pastureraised eggs in the Bay Area. But his chief operating officer, Danny Kramer, told him that Herminjard had done her research and would be worth meeting.
Evans, now 43, admits that his motives for talking to her weren’t completely pure.
“To be honest, I was single at the time and wanted to meet females,” he says in an ironic tone, over a crackle of Herminjard’s laughter. “I live in West Marin. It’s a beautiful, sprawling place, but God, there’s a very small pool of people here.”
Herminjard drove out from San Francisco to his authentically ranch-like bachelor pad, with its stuffed leather furniture, deer head and old-timey fireplace.
As they talked, Evans saw in her a glimmer of his younger self. He had also founded his company in his mid-20s after studying farm and ranch management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He had worked at his parents’ Point Reyes cattle ranch, where he grew up, and felt that the state already had plenty of great ranchers; what was missing was a direct connection to local tables.
It turned out that Herminjard wanted the same thing. Raised in North Carolina and educated at Duke University with a degree in public policy and a focus on social entrepreneurship, her idea was to buy older pasture-raised cows, no longer in their milkproducing prime, from Marin and Sonoma dairy farms and market them under the Mindful Meats brand. Though rarely used for meat locally, beef from older Jersey and Holstein cows has wonderful flavor and richness, and she wanted to take advantage of the resource.
After they talked for about 20 minutes, Evans popped the question: “So, do you want to see my cows?”
She said yes, and they jumped in his truck with his oldest dog, Bueno. As he drove, they talked about how they both wanted to expand access to “clean” meat, meaning — for them — meat raised without antibiotics, pesticides, hormones or GMOs. They also found that they shared similar views on land management practices that provide wildlife habitat and use natural fertilization, such as the chickens that roam the ranch.
Evans remembers finding her beautiful, engaging and smart. “I felt good energy even though we had only met for half an hour,” he says.
Suddenly, he asked, “Wait. How come you’re not married?”
Taken aback, she blurted out, “I haven’t found the right person, with shared values.”
With that, his mind scrambled for what to do next.
He decided to take her on a short walk out to the mother cows that he had trained to come to his call.
He parked the truck and they strolled over to the herd. He called them, and sure enough, “they all just stampeded over to us, coughing and farting and burping and all the stuff that cows do,” he says.
Herminjard was charmed as the bovines circled around them. “I almost hugged them, they were so beautiful,” she says.
Evans walked her uphill to a dramatic view overlooking Drakes Estero and the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly, he felt he was pushing things too far in a romantic direction. After all, it was supposed to be a work meeting, and they had only just met.
“I was doing this out of instinct, but I realized I might just scare her away,” he says.
Herminjard didn’t see it that way.
“That was one of the best days of my life,” she says. “Here’s this guy that totally embodied and completely understood why I was passionate about what I was passionate about. He was funny, he was charming.
“But I do have my rules,” she says. Do not get involved with a meat guy.
So they parted that fateful first meeting as friends.
Herminjard began to build her
business, finally getting her line of beef in stores in late 2013. During that period, she moved from San Francisco to the Marin town of Marshall and eventually to Point Reyes Station, about a 20minute drive from Evans’ home. She would see him at events and always take notice. They would have coffee from time to time, and began to talk about other things besides work.
Last year, there finally came the time that she felt fully established in her business. They were both single, and the friendship turned into a genteel courtship. But as with Herminjard’s approach to starting her company, they first took time talking over important issues, like whether they wanted to have a family (yes).
Now, their life could fill the pages of a foodie romance novel, that underappreciated literary genre. After running their businesses all day — he in Petaluma, she in Point Reyes Station — they cook dinner together in the ranch house’s large kitchen. In their spare time, they forage for wild mushrooms, make jam and go fishing. She grows kale and lettuces to serve with whatever meat they’re having. Using wild grapes found in her backyard, they pressed a batch of wine that’s a pretty fuchsia color — and fairly tart, if you’re not in love.
Because their meat products come from smaller herds of pasture-raised animals, they are on the high end — a pound of Mindful Meats ground beef is $9.99 on Amazon Fresh, and Marin Sun Farms’ eggs are $9 a dozen — though Mindful Meats offers meat at subsidized prices to Oakland Unified School District.
After they marry, Evans says, they will manage the ranch to- gether and sell whatever meat and eggs they produce back to either of their companies. She’ll help him fix fences and monitor which wildflowers are growing where — all to make sure the pasture and the animals stay healthy.
Maybe dating a meat guy wasn’t so bad after all.