I mean, I think that's staggering to a lot of people out there.

Yeah, absolutely.

And again, the American ranchers have just not been prioritized over the last decade.

And we silently took away the country of origin labeling law.

As a business, Good Ranchers, we've been trying to tell this story.

We've been shouting this story that there's no country of origin labeling.

We need transparency in sourcing in our beef and in our pork in the U.S. And so I think...

And

How did you, you know, how does that compare to like now? How do you approach your sourcing, processing and like getting the product to the consumer?

yeah so um full transparency and i've said this on other podcasts you know and and i you know i grew up in the south so i have one way of doing things and it's just being honest um and when we started we were we didn't know what we didn't know we just knew we wanted to fix it and we would you know and um and it wasn't until um And again, going back to, Shad could probably talk about this for days, but going back to the dishonesty in the system with not so much producers, but with the manufacturing side, on the selling side, the brokers and stuff, they'll just tell you whatever to sell you a product.

I'm not at all proud of the quality we were selling in the beginning, but we continually worked to how can we do this better? How can we do this better? How can we do this better? Because even at that time, I did not understand that there was no country of origin labeling law, which I think we'll talk more about that label later, but I didn't have a full understanding of that.

And in 2019, when I fully, I went to the North American Meat Conference in 2019 for the first time and learned so much.

And then, and that's when I realized, oh, I get it now.

Product of USA means nothing.

There's no country of origin labeling law.

And I'm going,

[laughs] So out of left field for you, right?

It was very out of left field.

Um, but it was recurring, and it just kept coming back.

And I kept telling my wife, "Someone should do something about this." Didn't think that someone was gonna be us, but, um, for the sake of time in the story, fast-forward about a year from that first conversation of someone should do this, uh, I was getting ready for the church I was working at and, um, it was a Sunday morning.

We had just had our first baby boy.

He was about six weeks old, and, uh, I started thinking about it again, and I, I, I heard the voice of the Lord, and He said, "You do it." And it, it was like a, you know, Saul Damascus road type moment for me.

And I came out of the bathroom, and I went to my wife Coralie, um, and I said, "I think God just told me to start a meat company."

[laughs]

[chuckles]

Yeah.

No, no. Um, no, we're really proud of the, of the quality that we're able to source and provide.

And, um, you know, again, I don't have an MBA, neither does my wife.

We weren't planning on being business owners, uh, but we made the decision.

Uh, it was two things.

Uh, so we started in 2018, like I said, selling meat in parking lots.

Love that

How do you, beyond just the great product you mentioned, how do you build that loyalty, that trust, that commitment from those customers? Because those stats are phenomenal.

Yeah.

I'm going to give more to this answer, but I am going to go back to...

the quality has to be there.

Sure.

And, um, and, and, and again, that's been, that was our whole messaging was, uh, better than the grocery store ditch, the grocery store.

Um, and, um, uh, it, and honestly, like we, I mean, we grew, gosh, we grew really fast when we, when we launched online.

And Ben, how do you guys deal with churn, avoid churn in the first place? Yeah, the easiest thing is to,

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we went in, did the surgery.

Um, it went extremely smooth, and, um, they had to do all the biopsies afterwards.

And three or four days later, we got the call and they said, "Hey," uh, or actually we, we had to go back in, uh, for the report, and they said, um, "Your, everything we removed that was cancer is completely dead.

And all the things that were lighting up in the original scan that we were saying that it had spread, there was never any cancer."

Mm-hmm.

Um, but, uh, once we started bringing children into the world, we really, uh, really started looking at everything.

When you say you were selling meat out of the back of a tr- what do you mean by that?

(laughs)

Right? What does that mean? (laughs)

Yeah, I know.

Uh, I was buying, like, uh, just prepackaged boxed beef from- from, like, a broker.

Uh, there's people that still do this.

They- af- af- once COVID happened, um, people started coming out of the woodworks, uh, doing that sort- sort of business model.

Yeah.