Burger from Bessie

Buyers can trace meat back to cow in company’s new system.

FAYETTEVILLE — Zephyr Foods, a specialty beef company based in Fayetteville, has developed a system that allows customers to identify the origin of their ground beef.

Say a burger came from a cow named Bessie. The name wouldn’t be on the packaging, but the customer could find out where Bessie was raised.

“For some people it’s just the knowledge and assurance of knowing it didn’t come from 1,000 animals,” said Michael Turley, Zephyr’s chief executive officer. “But some would still like to know where it exactly came from,” he said about Zephyr’s new ground beef product, where each package is sourced from a single cow.

The specialty ground beef is being considered one of the top food products at a trade show in Baltimore next month. It also will be available for online purchase soon, Turley said.

With this product, Zephyr is following a trend among packers and suppliers to increase their ability to trace products throughout their supply chains. Going the extra mile to tell the product’s origin story — where it was raised, by

whom and how it was taken care of — will win over shoppers who may be on the fence about certain food products on the market, said Martin Thoma, principal of Thoma Thoma marketing agency in Little Rock.

“Story is one of the most powerful communication mediums,” he said. “Now with a play like this in meat, you could tell the story about every pound of beef sold.”

Tyson Foods and others are already developing their own ways to identify and trace individual cuts of roasts and steaks back to the animal of origin with DNA technology. What makes Zephyr’s product stand out is its emphasis on ground beef.

Turley said they aren’t doing anything special. Zephyr is able to trace each package back to the animal at the production level by tracking

the ear tags and doing smallbatch processing.

“What we’re doing isn’t overly scientific, it just runs contrary to what others are doing,” he said. It is not uncommon to find traces from thousands of cows in a single package of ground beef due to modern processing, he said.

Zephyr began two years ago as a high-quality kosher beef business, Turley said. But along the way, he and friends began mining for opportunities or trends and quickly found that ground beef was an issue for some shoppers.

Turley said the company paused its kosher beef efforts a year ago and went all-in on its 1 Source Ground Beef. Each package is 100% traceable to a purebred, American Black Angus cow.

Thoma said the product was not unlike small-batch artisanal products, including wine, beer and yogurt. Some of the best wines in the world are exclusively sold or distributed, compared to lower-end,

cheaper wines that are easy to come by, he said.

“It’s likely to have a lot of appeal,” Thoma said about the single-origin ground beef.

Out of more than 400 submissions to the Natural Products Expo East 2019 NEXTY Awards, Zephyr’s 1 Source Ground Beef was one of 62 finalists across 22 categories. In the best new meat, dairy or animal-based product category, it was one of three.

“It’s just crazy exciting for us even to be named,” Turley said.

In the near future, Turley said, the company wants to focus more on the branded kosher beef program and finish development of a line of high-end sausages that has “cleaner, fewer ingredients and is great tasting.”

Zephyr is based in Arkansas, but the cattle are raised out of state. Turley said as the company grows they would like to add processors and suppliers from other parts of the country to their chain.

For now though, Zephyr is not overly concerned about growth. “We know the demand is there and we will service as we can and within reason,” he said.

Currently, Northwest Arkansas food truck Big Sexy Food is working with Zephyr to use its beef in burgers and other menu items.

Jason Apple, an animal science professor at Texas A&M Kingsville, said he really liked the idea of “putting a face on ground beef” and sourcing each package to one cow, instead of several. It reminded him of a packer in Iowa that did something similar years ago. Customers loved it at first, but issues began to arise after the company scaled up from 25 to 150 stores, he said.

What happened was a common problem across industries and is a concern for business leaders seeking to grow.

“The quality declined,” Apple said.