Andrew Jacobi ’12Journal 1
Food has always been a passion of mine. From the time my dad stuck a spoonful of pasta fagiole in my mouth at the ripe age of five, I have been enamored with the way that different foods can make you feel. To me, there is no better form of philanthropy or display of affection than feeding another person. As I have moved along in my education and my career, I have often thought about merging my passion for food with my job, and I was really looking forward to doing that after business school.
As I have learned more about the world of food and where I might fit into that world, I have been struck by how destructive the food that we eat can be — to our health, to our environment, and to many of the animals whose lives are sacrificed for our nutrition. When it comes to eating, Americans want convenience above all else, and what is convenient is most often what can be produced most efficiently and most inexpensively, and then delivered in bulk to many thousands of supermarkets around the country. The cost of this focus on convenience can be seen in so many places. The percentage of overweight adolescents in the United States has tripled in the last 30 years. Ninety-nine percent of the tallgrass prairies that once covered the United States have been depleted or destroyed to grow staple crops and raise cattle. Run-off from synthetic fertilizers that have seeped into the Mississippi River have now caused the largest dead zone in the world in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the destruction of the ecosystem that provides over half of the country’s seafood.
It is with these concerns in mind that I found my way to Wild Idea Buffalo Company. Wild Idea was founded by Dan O’Brien in 1991 with the “wild idea” that people across the nation should have access to healthy protein, that animals who are raised for their meat should live respectful and natural lives, and that eating this food should be beneficial to our environment rather than destructive. Since its founding, Wild Idea has grown tremendously, from a small ranch and 13 castaway buffalo calves to two ranches containing roughly 250 animals, plus supply relationships with neighboring ranches that share Dan’s principles. About a year ago, Wild Idea received venture funding to help it continue to grow, and six months ago, Dan and the Board decided to hire a CEO with 13 years of marketing experience at General Mills to take the company to the next level.
This is where I come in. In March, I met with CEO Josh Resnik for the first time, and was really intrigued by the company’s mission and business prospects. A few weeks later, Josh offered me a summer internship to help Wild Idea develop a market for their products in New York, find ways to reduce the company’s shipping costs by 25 percent, and develop a formalized plan for partnering with other like-minded buffalo farmers — so that we can increase our ability to supply buffalo to people all over the country, while allowing local ranchers to share in our growth as a company. This is a really exciting time in the company’s history as sales are expected to double this year, and our goal is to triple sales in 2012. I came to business school not only to develop the skills that would make me a better business person in the food industry, but to find a job where I could make a difference.
Journal 2
I have sent emails to probably 200 people at this point, everyone from supermarkets and restaurants to bloggers, event planners, and food distributors. The majority of the people I talk to have to go out of their way to talk to me, and it is difficult to get their attention. Of those 200 emails, I have probably gotten responses back from 30 of them. Maybe I need a better email, or maybe sales and marketing is so much harder than I thought it was going to be. For retail customers who order our products online, environmental sustainability, animal humaneness, and healthy eating are often enough to get someone to place an order. But when we are talking to wholesale customers, it is a business transaction, and it can be very difficult to explain to someone that even though our products are expensive, they are worth the premium and customers will feel the same way. Even those chefs and supermarket meat managers who have tried our products and loved them are hard to convert into a sale. With one restaurant in particular, the chef was so taken with our meat that he called Dan and Jill (our founders) to tell them how great he thought it was. And yet, despite me contacting him nearly twice a week with specials, menu ideas, and just to put in some face time, he has yet to place an order. Right now, in New York, two Dean and Deluca stores and the Ottomanelli and Sons Butcher Shoppe carry our products and I am beginning to wonder if I will make any more sales this summer.
While sales has been challenging, I have also been spending a lot of my time focusing on operations and logistics, trying to figure out how we can get our products to more customers at a lower cost and in less time. I have been meeting with food distributors, temperature-controlled warehouse operators, and package carriers to try to determine what is the best solution for our company at its current size, as well as what the best solutions will be in the future. So even if I have been unable to massively grow the top-line performance of the company, maybe I can at least expand the bottom line.
Journal 3
The summer is just about over and I have learned a lot about the sustainable meat business. I learned how large and complex the system is that allows an animal raised on a farm in some corner of the country to end up as your steak au poivre in a fancy restaurant or as a cryovac package that you pick up in the grocery store. The meat business in particular, because it is such a perishable product, is particularly complex, and most people within each link of this system are very set in the old way of doing things.
I have learned though, that with some creativity, a small, mission-driven meat company like Wild Idea Buffalo Company can participate in the food system and distribute our products as efficiently as possible, without sacrificing our ideals. My last day on the job (temporarily) was last Friday, when I gave a board presentation on the concept of using small, meat-focused food distributors in certain regions of the country to drive down shipping costs and add convenience for our wholesale customers.
Using a distributor was a third rail issue before I started doing my research. Our founders felt that with such a premium product and such an important story to tell only people who were really and truly invested in Wild Idea could tell that story. In their view, a distributor meant a large enterprise like Sysco, where our meat would be one of a million SKUs that customers chose from, and we would get lost in the shuffle. My presentation focused on how the right distributor for us is one that is small and has a history of helping small, sustainable businesses like ours grow.
And I am pleased to say that after being somewhat frustrated on the sales side for much of the summer, I am on the verge of not only signing an agreement with a distributor here in New York, but also getting a very large wholesale customer to be our anchor customer to sell through that distributor. My boss has asked me to come back to work part-time in the fall to see these relationships through to fruition and continue to expand our presence here in New York. I am excited to be a part of the growth of this important company and this important movement, and I cannot wait to get back to work.
