Bolinas rancher Bill Niman joins forces with meal-kit startup Blue Apron.
What happens when a seasoned Bolinas rancher and a food technology executive join forces? They plan to save the world, of course.
Bill Niman, a sustainablefood pioneer and former owner of Niman Ranch, sold his grass-fed beef and turkey company, BN Ranch, last week to meal-kit startup Blue Apron, which was already using his meat in its homedelivered dinners. In the course of doing so, Niman has signed on to revamp its entire meat supply.
“This was a unique opportunity to work with the world’s foremost leader in animal husbandry,” said Matt Wadiak, 38, Blue Apron chief operating officer. “Our vision statement is to build a better food system. This is a great step in that direction.”
“And we’re not going to stop with beef,” added Niman, 72, who will retain the title of president and founder of BN Ranch within Blue Apron.
Founded in 2012, New York’s Blue Apron is considered the leader in the $1.5 billion meal kit industry — consisting of companies that speed up dinner preparation by delivering boxes of portioned raw ingredients with recipes to customers’ homes. Blue Apron has served BN Ranch’s grass-fed beef and free-range turkey for two years. Over half of the beef served in its estimated 8 million monthly meals comes from BN Ranch, in dishes like chipotle-glazed meatloaf and seared steaks with potatoes. The goal with this acquisition is to scale up its supply and transition all of its beef, turkey, chicken and pork to BN Ranch standards — and to begin labeling it as BN Ranch meat.
Blue Apron has never purchased another food company
“We can raise animals better without torturing them or the environment.” Bill Niman
before and neither have its peers, such as San Francisco’s all-organic Sun Basket. It’s unclear whether this unusual partnership is a sign of things to come. Now that food companies on every level, from fast food to fine dining, feel a need to tout their sustainability standards, perhaps the pressure is on for food technology firms to make an even broader statement about the environmental impact of their products.
Niman and his wife, Nicolette Hahn Niman, started BN Ranch in 2007, 40 years after he co-founded the meat company that would eventually be called Niman Ranch, which grew to become a major supplier of sustainable beef and pork to grocery stores and restaurants. He left Niman Ranch soon after Natural Food Holdings became chief investor in the company in 2006, because of disagreements with how it was run. In 2015, Niman Ranch was bought by Perdue, one of the nation’s largest chicken producers.
BN Ranch works with about 20 farms and ranchers in California and New Zealand to produce seasonal grassfed beef and free-range turkey, and Niman said it will continue to offer those products to wholesale Bay Area customers, including several stores and restaurants.
Blue Apron already gets ingredients directly from 150 farms and ranches, but Wadiak said bringing the company — and Niman — on board was the only way to make larger-scale changes like getting involved with breeding programs, raising calves on farms and finishing them on grass. The company already says it does not serve animals raised in confinement or treated with hormones or subtheraputic antibiotics.
“To effect change on farms and create premium beef on the scale we wanted we had to be vertically integrated,” said Wadiak.
Much beef labeled grass-fed is on pasture for a short period and finished with grain so that it can be available year-round. Niman said his grass-fed beef is raised only on grass and slaughtered when it reaches an optimal weight, during a short period of the year. For Blue Apron, the plan is to keep beef to this natural cycle and then age it, cut it and flash-freeze it to use during other seasons.
“If you harvest animals when they’re in high season — just like nectarines and asparagus — they’re plentiful and they’re cheaper,” said Niman. He began working with ranchers in New Zealand several years ago for a better year-round supply.
Niman is particularly excited about the meal kit company’s ability to use the whole animal in all kinds of preparations — ground beef from different cuts for example — rather than just certain prized steaks, which he said will bring more profit to individual ranchers.
“We can raise animals better without torturing them or the environment, without pushing back on the farmerrancher,” he said.
Meals from Blue Apron start at $8.74 per serving, depending on the size of the order. Wadiak would not disclose whether Blue Apron would raise prices for this new meat program. He said it doesn’t have plans to purchase other farms or ranches. Last year the company was rumored to be making plans for an initial public offering, though in December, Bloomberg reported that plans to sell stock had been put on hold.
A former chef who got to know Niman’s products while working at Oliveto in Oakland, Wadiak connected with him a few years ago when they realized their companies shared a warehouse space.
Niman has a reputation for exacting standards. Some have called them over the top. Niman previously told The Chronicle that disagreements over cattle-raising were a large part of what caused him to leave his Niman Ranch. It raises the question of how that relationship would work within Blue Apron.
“It was no compromise with Bill,” said David Samiljan, owner of Baron’s Meats & Poultry, a butcher shop in Alameda, who worked at Niman Ranch as a butcher and quality control manager in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He remembers how Niman would insist on feed and humane standards of certain quality.
“That was the way it was done. The Niman way,” he said.
“And it showed in the product,” added Samiljan, who carries BN Ranch beef at his store and still remembers the first time he tasted a Niman Ranch pork chop.
For his part, Niman said that his philosophies around animal husbandry are a good match with his new business partner, however unlikely the pairing. Wadiak spent 100 days in the past two years visiting ranches with Niman.
“The fact that I’ve been working with Matt so closely, I know Blue Apron is driven by doing the right thing,” said Niman. “My experience in the past is that it has not always been that way in the meat industry.”