Emmer & Co.® is a 100% pasture-raised chicken company on a mission to build a healthier and more sustainable model for how poultry in America is produced.
Problem
Since 1950, most chicken sold in America are raised in indoor barns, produced with practices that are out of sync with changing consumer preferences, and lack flavor. Although there are 9,000,000,000 chickens produced every year in the U.S., consumers have very few alternative options to select from when choosing which kind of chicken to eat.Solution
By raising slow-growing chickens entirely on pasture, focusing on fair farming partnerships, and using transparent regenerative farming methods that create healthy soil, Emmer & Co. is bringing the best tasting, healthiest food to your family’s dinner table.The Future of Chicken Farming
We are taking everything we’ve learned and building our first replicable Pilot Farm that utilizes our turnkey chicken production system. After dialing in all our protocols by operating the Pilot Farm ourselves, the result will be that we will have developed the “Pasture Raised Chicken Protocols” that we can use to scale the production of Pasture Raised chickens with new farmers as integrated growers in the Emmer & Co. family, not only on the West Coast, but across the country.
Offering farmers a revenue generating opportunity where the company provides them with the production protocols and the technical expertise to be successful, and the farmers own their own fixed infrastructure, is very common in the general agriculture industry. Our model improves on this general relationship by using low cost non-permanent infrastructure to enable farmers to generate extra income from their land that is otherwise underutilized and with a system that improves their land’s soil health and resilience. The low-cost standardized infrastructure, higher margins, guaranteed buyer, and the soil benefits from raising chickens on pasture all make this a beneficial opportunity for farmers.
Success to Date
We've spent the last three years proving the market, establishing distribution channels, understanding the pricing and positioning of premium protein, and performing R&D to find an optimal way to raise chickens on pasture at scale. We're set up to sell through ten distributors and have sold to over 100 individual accounts (restaurants and retailers) and can reach thousands more through our distributors. We have a sales pipeline for 10,000 chickens a week in 2018.
In March 2018 we were approved as Bon Appetit's (BAMCO) Farm to Fork supplier for chicken in Northern California. Their combined purchase power can equate to 5,000 chickens per week in 2018 in Northern California alone. BAMCO is the cafe operator for many corporate and university dining operations, including Google, University of San Francisco, Adobe, Oracle, Uber, Workday, and others.