Vancouver-based McLean Meats works with responsible farms and meat processors in the United States and Canada to produce nitrite-free deli meats. Garth McLean brought partner Michelle Nielsen into the family-owned business in 2003, combining her branding expertise with his pedigree in the meat industry. The firm, which sells more than 35 products in about 600 stores across Canada, is doing its best to sell organic meat, too. It used a mixture of product and process innovation to carve out a niche in a market dominated by a few key players. McLean, who works another job as a sales executive for a Vancouver mushroom grower, spoke to Danny Bradbury about how the company was able to speed up the process in a traditionally paper-based industry. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Q Why don’t you put nitrites in your meat?
A Nitrite is a chemical used in the food industry — most commonly in deli meats. It’s what gives bacon and ham that nice appealing pink colour. It also gives it a long shelf life and kills off potential pathogens. But you can take a ham, and by the time they pump it full of chemicals and nitrites, a one pound leg weights 3.5 lbs. It’s beautiful and pink inside and it looks delicious because it’s a chemical — it’s like a bleach. And that ham lasts six months because it kills everything possible. You’re making cheap food, in terms of cost and nutritional value. The baloney and the cheap hams out there are what the average consumer can afford to buy, and they’re not getting value for money. We should decrease the amount of meat that we eat and have better quality. Keep it clean. Meat, salt, spice. That’s all you need.
Q Food is a highly regulated industry. Any challenges?
A The first seven to eight years were a real struggle. When we started there was no such thing as preservative-free deli meats. We went to manufacturers and they came back to us and said “you can’t do that.” Then we went to to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and it said “you can’t call bacon bacon if you’re not putting nitrites in it, because it’s defined as a pork belly that’s cured with nitrites.”
For a while we had to call our products things like breakfast strips. We were pioneering change on labelling in Canada at a time when the industry rules didn’t know how to handle us. We are not being met with that resistance now. We have products on the shelves called bacon. So somewhere along the line, it’s changed, and I would say we’re part of that catalyst, but it’s not us.
Q What were your other challenges?
A We launched the company and within four months avian flu hit. Most of our products were poultry-based. Two years later, there was a listeria outbreak at Maple Leaf. We were considered guilty by association. Sales were down at least 30% across Canada, Then, a couple of years later, the recession happened. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. What’s kept us here is that we haven’t had the high overhead because we’re a cloud-based company. If we had maintained infrastructure, buildings, staff, and other overhead, we would have imploded. But because we’re light on our feet, we’re able to manage costs.
Q What does “cloud-based” mean?
A The company is managed 100% remotely. There is no headquarters. Where we are is where our office is. We outsourced everything. When we launched, a lot of the big warehousing companies didn’t have Web-based real time inventory trackers. We would have to ask them to fax us inventory reports. Things were slow, and not dynamic. Before technology came in, people could afford to have these reports once a month because the meat had a six-month shelf life, but when we first started, we had 21 days. We created our own customized Excel spreadsheet inventory tracker that allowed us to see at any given point in time where the product was, what lot number, what the shelf date was on it, where it was coming from and where it was going. That allowed us to manage products with a short shelf life.
Q Was it difficult to implement?
A There was a learning curve. It has been fully implemented for less than a year, and it involved a two-year transition. During the first phase, we didn’t have a dedicated server. We had software installed locally. When we thought we had a solution, we ran into multiple barriers. It was slow, we were limited in the number of users, it froze, and we got thrown off the system. Now, we are paying $285 a month for a dedicated server. Everyone said we couldn’t do this. But mushrooms last four days. There are already so many highly perishable products being distributed, so we thought, “why can’t we?”