Lorentz Meats

On paper, the Lorentz family business hasn’t changed much since Mike’s father bought a butcher shop in 1968. Then there were 20- 30 employees, now there are 45. Then there was a facility with 10,000 square feet, some of it dedicated to retail, and now there are 10,000 square feet, all dedicated to processing (with the former facility now used for storage). Then it was a locally owned, family- run C-Corporation, and it remains so today. But like other meat processors, the Lorentz family has had to change with the times.

The meat processing business was great throughout the 1970s. But in the 1980s, when the farm economy crashed, so did the demand for butchering. The Lorentz family tried to add other businesses to make ends meet—a deli, retail sales, weekend catering—but nothing seemed to take off. Mike frankly didn’t even see a future for himself in the company, so he went off to college and studied food science. His oldest brother Tom did the same and became a civil engineer. Their brother, Rob, stayed behind to help run the plant. By 1990, looking for a fresh start, Rob and his father asked Mike to come back into the company and see if they could use their collective smarts to reinvent the family business.

In the nearly two decades since, Mike and Rob have transformed the company into one of the country’s models of small-scale meat processing. Notes Mike, “as business partners, we have the good fortune of offsetting each other’s talents. Rob expertly manages the plant operations while I manage the business and marketing. I get to be the face, but Rob makes sure it gets done. It works well for us.” While the brothers hold 60% of the stock of the company, they have also needed significant infusions of capital at various points, so there are now 10 other shareholders, most of them living near the plant.

By the year 2000, their business had grown large enough to justify building a 10,000 square foot processing plant with full USDA certification. Many of their peers thought they were nuts. Typically, a growing processing business will rehabilitate an existing plant to keep down costs. But old facilities, Mike argues, are notoriously troublesome, with designs way out of sync with modern health and safety codes and with machines prone to frequent breakdown. By putting the new plant in a state-of-the- art industrial park, everything was up to code and the machinery first rate.

Mike argues that even though each of the steps in his plant may be less efficient and require more costly manual labor than the assembly line approach of much larger facilities, the overall efficiency of his operation is pretty good. By putting everything under one roof, he can minimize the distance from one operation to the next and improve quality control. “What we lack in scale we make up for in logistics. What you would have paid truckers and separate processors to do under the traditional processing scheme, we can cover in-house.”