Locavore Delivery Q&A

My family is changing the way we’re eating. Meals are based on more vegetables, less starch, and less (but much better quality) proteins. Getting rid of more processed foods has made more room in my refrigerator and freezer leaving, instead, truly flavorful, better for us and better for the environment foods. We’re feeling the benefits of these changes too. And because we’re shopping with more purpose (instead of just shopping deals or what grabs us while roaming the aisles of the store), we’re saving money. Part of this change was helped by discovering Locavore Delivery, a Colorado company that delivers pasture raised, 100% local meat that comes from small family farms and ranches, delivered to customer’s homes in Boulder, Denver, Golden, Longmont, Estes Park and other areas. 

We asked Craig Taber, founder and CEO of Locavore Delivery if he’d answer some questions for us that we thought you’d like to know about too.

And now, a Q & A with the owner of Locavore Delivery

InGoodTasteDenver: How and why did you open Locavore Delivery?
Craig Taber: I have been a chef and amateur farmer for my whole life. At 21, I was the Executive Chef of a small restaurant I helped open that’s still open today. I know the importance of sourcing high-quality, pasture raised meats, both from a taste and health perspective, and I was disappointed with the lack of convenient options to do so in Colorado. So, I started researching and bought a whole cow from a guy I met on Craigslist. It was terrible. For the next year, as we gnawed our way through shoe leather textured beef, I dreamed of there being a better way. I started Locavore Delivery a few months later, in 2013.

IGTD: Tell us more about what were you doing before you started Locavore Delivery?
CT: I joined the Navy right out of high school. That brought me to Hawaii, where I opened a restaurant as the Executive Chef (I had lots of experience in my family’s restaurants). When I left Hawaii, I moved to Colorado and eventually graduated from CU Boulder. During college I was brought onto a startup team as a partner for a really high-end electric bicycle company. I was the VP of Marketing there for 8 years as we created a worldwide brand. I left my job there to start Locavore and get back to my first love, food.

IGTD: What do you feel you bring to the table (literally and figuratively) that you think others who do something similar (or even just shopping at the grocery store) don’t?
CT: We are all really blessed to live in a state where we have lots of options for great food. Locavore Delivery is different in that we’re small by design. I have seen lots of larger, better-funded companies come in to try to do something similar on a bigger scale, and it has mixed results. I think the real risk to getting too big is that it’s hard to keep your soul when you do. The most valuable thing we bring to the table is our relationships with our Ranch Partners and Producers – they give what we do soul. We are just the people who deliver their labor of love to our customers who trust us to do that critical step.

IGTD: What are some of the products you sell?
CT: We sell pasture raised, grass-fed beef, grass-fed bison, heritage breed pork, wild caught sockeye salmon, and legit pasture raised chicken. We have pasture raised turkeys coming this summer!

IGTD: How did you select the farmers you did to work with?
CT: It’s really a multi-faceted relationship. Our Ranch Partners are like family to us. There is a layer to the relationship that is critical: do they produce, or are they willing to produce at a quality level that is a good fit for our customers? Also, do we like each other? That is important to us, because we love what we do, and we work with people who love what they do too. It matters.

IGTD: How do you maintain the relationship?
CT: In the years that we have been in business, we have never signed a written contract with any of our Ranch Partners. With some of them, if we all of the sudden stopped buying from them, it would be a really bad situation for them. And vice versa – if they just stopped selling to us, we would be in trouble.

We have made many deals on the back of a horse or with a handshake. Integrity matters. We are honest, upfront, and we treat each other with respect. Our relationships are forged out of mutual respect and fairness.

IGTD: What is an item or some items that people don’t tend to order from you that you wish they would give a try?
CT: I love this question. I have 10-20 customers who text me on a regular basis asking me for the same recommendation. I LOVE getting those messages.

I am a huge student of traditional Mexican food as of late. One thing I like about the different regions of Mexico is how they use the whole animal to make incredible food.

I also really like shredded beef short rib tacos. They have really incredible flavor and the texture is second to none. I cook the short ribs in my slow cooker with some chili powder, salt, garlic and onion.

IGTD: How would you say your prices compare to going to the grocery store?
CT: They don’t. You can’t find truly pasture raised meats at most grocery stores. Labels on food are super confusing to the point of being misleading to the layman. Generally speaking, and in my experience, truly pasture raised meats cannot be produced with the volume and consistency to be sold in that kind of volume. In my experience, the only way to get legit pasture raised meats is at your local farmers market, or through a small distributor like us.

That said, it is more expensive than grocery store meat, but not as much as you may think. My advice around that is it is better to eat smaller amounts of high-quality, nutrient dense meat than to gorge on bland grocery store meat.

IGTD: What’s special about your packaging?
CT: All of our meats are vacuum sealed, so they last a long time in the freezer. (1-2 years!!)

Aside from that, your meat is delivered at your door in a recyclable brown paper grocery bag or a box for bigger orders. Easy peasy.

IGTD: What would you say to people who might say they are concerned that you’re leaving a carbon footprint by delivering?
CT: The most carbon intensive thing we do as first world citizens is air travel, period. Big, national mail order meat companies, no matter the quality of their meat, largely ship your meat to you by air. Is it really necessary to be airfreighting meat all around the country? More specifically, is it reasonable to ship meat INTO a huge ag state like Colorado? Definitely not.

Our suppliers average 160 miles away. That is incredibly close in food-miles. The less your food travels, the better your carbon footprint.

IGTD: How should people prepare for starting service with you, i.e., plan to cook the items in their order within X number of days? Make room in their freezer?
CT: What our customers love about our service is that it’s completely flexible. You can order as much or as little as your family needs to eat in a month. Everything is vacuum sealed, so it lasts a long time in the freezer. If your freezer starts to get a little backed up, you can very easily pause your deliveries for a few months.

All of our curated subscriptions are 100% customizable too! Before each delivery, you can see what is coming and you can make any changes you want at no additional charge, unless you decide to purchase more expensive things.

IGTD: When you started the business, and pictured people using Locavore Delivery, what was the picture in your head?
CT: I wanted to give folks a reasonably priced, convenient option to buy great quality meats. This option did not exist 5 or 6 years ago. Moving forward, we are going to be adding more local, non-meat products as well as some really high-quality prepared items that we find delicious.

We are living the dream right now. We are connecting passionate customers with passionate producers and doing what we love.

New Normal Update, April 29:

IGTD: Has the business been affected by the closure of the meat packing plants? In other words, are your local sources still going strong… and does that mean there’s never been a better time for people to use Locavore Delivery?  
CT: Yes, we have seen a massive increase in demand – so much so that we currently have a waiting list to get one of our curated subscription boxes. We still offer limited a la carte meat sales on our website with no waitlist. 

IGTD: What are you doing to make sure you’re able to deliver the quantity your customers are ordering? 
CT: We were doing pretty well until there was a fire at Innovative Foods, one of our main processors on 3/17 causing them to be closed until they get things going again. I guess when it rains it pours. We had a lot of redundancy in our supply chain, so we were able to shift a lot of the processing over to another partner, but we are still not able to get the same quantity as we had hoped. All of the small, local processors are running at capacity – and there is really no end in sight. 

IGTD: How are you working to find/help new local partners? 
CT: Right now we proceeding gently. We have decided to sell what meat we have in our pipeline, and to limit the number of curated subscription boxes we sell each month (hence the waiting list) so that we can keep focused on how to continue to serve our customers the highest quality product available. In the end, we would rather have 700 REALLY happy local families than 1,000 families of people that think our service is meh. That said, we have started partnerships with a few non-meat companies to help them distribute their products, The Spice Guy being one, a limited number of his products are available on our website now and we have A LOT more local, non-meat products coming soon. 

IGTD: In addition to The Spice Guy, are there other non-meat partners you’re hoping to be able to bring to customers? 
CT: Yes. We are working very hard on making a quantum leap in that department. We are not ready to talk about it publicly quite yet, but it’s happening – we are going big. 

 

 

What else is In Good Taste? Our interview with the local contestant on the Food Network Show, Worst Cooks in America. And here’s another interview we did with the owner of a Colorado restaurant, Besame.

Please note, we partnered with Locavore Delivery to bring you this review and were compensated with our first order of items.