Interview:

Craig Taber - Locavore Delivery

By: Sam Henke

Locavore Delivery

has rapidly become the Front Range's premier source for quality local meats delivered directly to your front door.  Founder and CEO Craig Taber has rooted himself in the local ranching community and is serving up local beef, pork, lamb, and more, to conscientious carnivores across Colorado's Front Range. I spoke with Craig at his office/farm outside Golden, CO on his passion for food, commitment to community, and love for all things local. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

SH: What is your name and what do you do?

Craig Taber – I do pretty much everything, I was cleaning the bathroom this morning and I’m the founder and CEO.  I have 6 employees and manage them as well.

SH: What is your favorite food?

CT: I think my favorite food depends on the season and where I’m at, I like regional foods and when we travel we go to cooking classes in different countries, so, my favorite food is the one that’s right in front of me.

SH: What first drew you to working in the food world? What is the origin of your food passion?

CT: My family owned a bunch of restaurants on the East Coast when I was growing up so I started cooking there.  We were doing farm-to-table before it was farm-to table—before it was economically viable basically. So I had a background working in restaurants, and I opened my first restaurant when I was 21.  I got away from food for a little bit, but it's my favorite thing, so that’s what I do.

SH: What do you love most about working with food?

CT: What I love most about food in general is how is brings people together.  Its like a community building thing—everybody eats.

SH: Who has inspired you in your career?

CT: When I was first getting started I worked pretty closely with one of my uncles who has since passed away, but he started about a half dozen restaurants or so, and he really taught me a lot about the business.

SH: What do most people not understand about local food/meat?

CT: There’s that old, “Rather than asking why my stuff is so expensive, ask why yours is so cheap” and I have that conversation with people quite a bit.  When people buy local food they are supporting a local ecosystem, literally, and a local economy, which is difficult to articulate to people.  When we buy meat from a local rancher, that rancher is supporting a dozen or more employees on their farm, and they have families, and it ripples through the economies, and those people are eating out at restaurants and it all just makes the economy a lot stronger.

And the ecology of it, aside from the benefits of not having to ship stuff super far, one of our ranchers was able to convert her ranch over to a permanent conservation easement, since the land constituted an economically viable ranching operation. I think of ranching in terms of land stewardship, and ranchers look at things in a really long view in terms of land stewardship and other things, and I believe it's just a really great way to preserve open space and boost the local economy.

SH: What is the key to improving our food systems?

CT: Like any system, it has to grow evenly, all the parts have to grow at the same rate. For instance customer awareness, which drives demand, a distribution system, and the production systems and the processing, you know all that has to grow in tandem or else one gets ahead of the other and it just doesn’t work.

I think right now there’s a lot of customer demand, and the reason I started this company is I think the crux of local food is logistics, and I think the producers will produce, and the customers will buy it, but its through effective logistics and supply chain management. We can maximize value for customers and can make it convenient and easy and in that way, compete with the big guys, the big industrial food system, which have the logistics pretty dialed.

SH: I think that’s really interesting, and is one of the reasons I’m interested in looking at food at the ‘systems’ level.  It’s easy to look at the more glamorous ends of a system, farming is romanticized and our culture has a kind of celebrity-chef obsession, but everything in between—people don’t think about that as much, and that’s a really good point.

CT: It’s a tough problem, systems design is kind of my thing, you know I’m a systems nerd, and it’s a tough problem, there are a lot of moving parts.   You don’t get into local food systems to get rich, that’s for sure. That's what I love about it though, local food is by definition a distributed network, so you can’t have a huge company come in and monopolize it.  It’s all about that last-mile piece. Most of my ranchers are a hundred miles away and I just pick it up and move it around—it’s a lot of these small moving parts rather than these big 18 wheelers, that’s the reason I really like it.

SH: What is your definition of a sustainable business?

CT: That’s a great question, and we talk about that all the time around here. Extractive businesses are ones where there’s a winner and a loser, and I think a sustainable business is one where everyone wins—our customers, our suppliers, my employees, and my greater community.  So we have a very active role in all those things, in giving back to the community. My employees all make living wages and we really take care of them.  We have handshake agreements with all of our suppliers, you know we don’t do contracts or anything like that—its just the way we want to do things.  When we work with our suppliers its like ‘hey look, this is what we’re selling it for, this is what we need to make, can you sell it for this, and if not, how can we meet in the middle?’ So its not like we try to beat them up and lowball them, and maximize profits or whatever, we’re aware we’re part of a bigger system, so we really try to take a holistic view at all of our interactions.  

SH: If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be and what would be served?

CT: Howard Zinn, I would want to make tacos, I’m pretty partial to tacos.

SH: Would you describe Locavore as a mission-driven company? What is your mission?

CT: We are a mission-driven company, our mission is right here [gestures to the sign on the wall].  We do 100% local food, connection is the most important thing for us, connection to our producers, and our processors, and our customers, and our greater community. And quality, that’s it, those three things. These are our guiding principles, and when we need to make a decision, we ask what is most in alignment with these things.

SH: Who are your best customers? Who do you market to? Who would you like to be your customers?

CT: We’re still learning who our customers are, and we have several different offerings that are designed for different customer profiles.  Based on customer feedback we just launched a fully custom subscription where people can choose what they like, and can order custom cuts, and we can get whatever they want, every month, and its our largest growing segment right now.

SH: How does Locavore differ from other food order services?

CT: So one we’re 100% local, we only deliver locally, we only sell local products. I like the idea the meal prep services [i.e. blue apron]—what turns me off about that is the ridiculous about of packaging, and that to me is a non-starter. It just doesn’t work for me for that reason.  We looked at that at first, I mean I’m a chef, it’s what we do, but I was like ‘we can’t do it without a ridiculous amount of packaging’.

SH: What is on the horizon for Locavore in terms of innovation?

CT: We just started carrying chicken, I just found a chicken supplier that’s doing the right stuff, that’s a big one.

SH: When you do go to start a new partnership with a producer, what do you look for, or how do you evaluate their operation?

CT: It depends on what we’re looking at, chicken for example, there’s not a lot of medium-sized chicken producers, there’s a reason for that, it’s a scale thing.  Meat chickens are only 12-16 weeks old when they’re sent to slaughter, and so its really hard to do as a small producer.  And to do pasture-raised birds, not like ‘access to pasture’ birds that are actually outside, that’s even harder.  Then you start to look at feed, and that’s even harder.  So you start looking at pasture-raised birds, but they’re fed corn and soy, which is just a problem.  So finding somebody that can do it all right is tough, and finding somebody that’s inspired by what they’re doing. 

So when I went out to see Mark McCauley at McCauley Family Farms, they don’t even have a barn to put their chickens in, they put their chickens outside.  So they do three batches all summer, they’re fed soy and corn-free, gmo-free diets, and they’re out in the pasture doing their thing. His farm is as close to biodynamic in Boulder as I've seen, and they have a great scene out there, so that to me is the kind of energy I want to put in my body. 

The family lives on the farm, they’re out there, this is what they’re doing and I’m like “this is it.”  It's not just a cash generating operation, they clearly love what they’re doing, and that’s what I want to support, I love what I’m doing—I want to work with other people who love what they’re doing.

SH: “Local” is obviously the center of your strategy, what other food business or sustainability concepts play into your business strategy?

SH: It’s food that feels good.  I think that there’s a lot of buzzwords that get tossed around, and I know when I go to a ranch or a farm, I know if it feels good or not, and we sell food that feels good.  For example, one of our beef suppliers Elin [Parker] at Sangres Best, her beef is technically grass-finished.  Because most of the time she buys calves from other ranchers and during transport, they might be offered grain a couple days, and because of that she can’t certify her entire herd is only ever fed grass their entire life. But they spend their whole life on a ranch and she does an amazing job, so for the rest of their lives they’re only on grass, there’s no feedlot, but because of that shes not certified 100% grass-fed.  But when I look at the whole system, I understand why she’s doing what she’s doing, and when I go there these cows are stoked! So they got grain for a couple days, big deal, you know I eat junk food every once in a while too.  Elin loves what she does and we’re totally transparent with our customers about it and explain it, and they are cool with that.

Customers want to put things in a box, they want to classify things, and that’s useful, but it becomes problematic when you don’t know why the boxes are the way they are. People ask me, “is this meat certified organic”? None of our meat is certified organic, most people don’t have any idea what organic certification looks like for a 20,000-acre cattle farm, its ridiculous. Certified organic beef is for industrial beef, these [smaller] farmers can’t do it, its so ridiculous. What we are doing, and that’s where the trust piece and the local piece and the connection piece come in, is we’re just explaining to people why things are the way they are, and they can make a decision on their own. 

We do ranch tours twice a year, people can go down there and check things out, ask any questions they want to, look for big barrels of chemicals and there’s nothing down there. That’s the part that’s missing for me in our food system, the connection piece, people see, they’re like “Oh, this is Elin and this is the land where the beef is raised” and people are like “cool, that I can understand.”  I really like the connection part of it, with the farmers and the consumers, that’s another difference with locavore, we don’t buy beef from someone and slap our label on it, we keep their name on it, we’re just the guys that bring it to you, they’re the ones that raised it, keep their name on it to keep that connection piece, right?

Learn more about Locavore Delivery and their suppliers at their website.