The road that led to the "Local Yocal":
Matt jumped ship from his steady income in April 2009 to start Genesis Beef. Matt grew up farming, ranching and being involved in many facets of agriculture; so starting a beef company was not a completely blind venture. The biggest hurdle before us was the limited supply of processing facilities that had the proper level of licensing to enable us to resell our product. Once we connected with facilities with the proper licensing, customer service was the next issue! The few facilities available to us were so backlogged with business that ours had very little value. Our processing was either done their way or no way, no exception. After we butchered our first set of steers we instantly knew that the next step in our business had to be getting our processing in our own hands, we just weren't satisfied with the quality and service out there.
And that's where the dream of what is now Local Yocal began...
Our first and foremost desire was to provide a much needed facility to serve the growing number of small producers. Quality grass-fed beef cannot be produced on a large industrial scale and in order to meet the growing demand for the product, small producers need the means to be successful and processing is a large factor. We want to encourage camaraderie amongst producers and work together to promote industry growth.
In addition to providing quality processing,we wanted to be able to serve FRESH grass-fed beef to consumers, that has always ony been available frozen.
As we have been out at Farmer's Markets over the last year, we met so many great families, producing wonderful products. And from there our vision of the retail side of the store continued to grow, centered on the intention to have a face and a story behind all the products in our store.
So here we are today! We are open, available to small producers as a quality processing facility, equipped with deli cases stocked with fresh grass-fed beef and a retail front with a handful of very high quality products, all from folks we know (with very few exceptions)! Local Yocal is a true "mom & pop" shop with heart, soul and passion behind what we are doing. We did not just jump on the bandwagon of selling people "natural" and "organic" stuff. Both having Ag backgrounds, we became very skeptical of those labels when so many large companies jumped on board. We decided we wanted more confidence in knowing what we were really buying and consuming - so we took production into our own hands - and that passion is what lies behind what we are bringing to our store and your families!
