OTH #3: Tina Levy, Co-Founder, First Hand Foods -- Lessons From The Sausage Wagon

So the sausage wagon was my trial by fire of what it meant to take a business from idea to execution. And we thought, okay, we'll launch the sausage wagon. A month later we'll launch the wholesale business. Well then I was like, as soon as the sausage wagon launched, I realized, oh crap, like we have systems to build, we have routines.

Yeah. That is a business. That business requires, you know, someone to run it.

Yeah. And so I could see what was coming. 1101 00.

Hey there, I'm Eric Boggs and this is 11 003. My guest today is Tina Levy. Tina is the co founder of First Hand Foods, a woman owned meat business based here in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. I teased Tina a bit in this episode that her business operates on hard mode, which I think very much is the case. It's not just a marketplace that connects restaurants and chefs and caterers and stores with local meat farmers based in the Southeast. They're a marketplace that connects people with perishable goods, literally from farm, as in from birth all the way through to table. And it's a fascinating story and a fascinating business. And Tina is really smart and just fantastic. I think you'll really like this episode. Thanks for listening. Tina. I'm so glad that you're here.

Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be fun.

Yeah. So I guess describe your business like most of the people that I know and most of the people that listen to this are tech people. You are decidedly in the physical goods category. Describe your business at a high level and then I've got some pretty pointed questions for you.

On the most basic level, Firsthand Foods sells meat. We are predominantly a wholesaler of beef, pork, lamb and chicken and all of that meat. We're a mission driven business focused on supporting small family farms that are raising animals outdoors on pasture. So all of that meat comes from those kind of farmers. They're all here in North Carolina or nearby. And our mission and purpose is to create market access for them. So we're helping get those meats into restaurants, specialty retailers and institutions like public schools, university dining halls, corporate dining halls. We have about 30 farmers in our network. We work with about four different small scale meat processing plants to do the slaughter and fabrication work for us. So we don't really open packages of meat. We're just a lot focused on supply chain development, logistics, market development, getting meat from A to B and making sure folks are happy with the quality of that.

It's complicated was what I heard from that. Lots of moving parts yeah, go. Go back to the very beginning. Like, it's clear, like, why you started this. It's about access for farmers and preserving that way of life and providing a quality product. How, like, what's the first step to finding your first customer in a marketplace business like this?

For us, our first hire was a big part of that. So our first hire was a chef named Drew Brown, who happens to be on our team again. And he was coming out of owning a restaurant called Piedmont, which was one of the first restaurants in downtown Durham.

I remember Piedmont.

He was known. Great restaurant. He was. He was known for local sourcing. He was known for quality food. And we happened to find out that he was exiting his restaurant around the time that we were trying to get going. And so those early days were all about relationships and a lot about Drew's relationships. And so we just tapped the Durham restaurant community and said, hey, would you be interested in this? And their feedback and support and belief in what we were doing at that early stage was critical. They sort of gave us proof of concept. They helped us. You know, Drew did a lot of product development. We hit the ground running with different. A suite of sausages that he developed for us. And we actually hit the market with a food truck that was.

Yeah, I remember the food truck, too.

It was called the Sausage Wagon. And it was our way of getting our brand, our products, and our story out in the world, and it really worked. And our very first wholesale customer, though, was Saxophone General Store. I remember very vividly Jeff Barney, one of the founders and owners there, calling me, like, as soon as he heard what we were doing, probably from the press release from our launch event, and saying, okay, how can I get some of this product? And we were not ready for him. I remember. So the Sausage Wagon was my trial by fire of what it meant to take a business from idea to execution. And we thought, okay, we'll launch the Sausage Wagon. A month later, we'll launch the wholesale business. Well, then I was like, as soon as the Sausage Wagon launched, I realized, oh, crap. Like, we have systems to build. We have routines.

Yeah, that is a business. That business requires, you know, someone to run it.

Yeah. And so I could see what was coming with the launch of the whole sun. So we slowed everything down. It was probably four months later that we actually launched the wholesale side of the business. But Jeff was our very first customer. He was raring to go. And I was looking back through our list of early customers, preparing for this conversation, and it was. It was toast. It was six plates. It was Gear Street Garden, and a lot of those folks who were still around and still have us on the menu.

Yeah. Wow. So you, you started, you had relationships and started building relationships before you really even had access to your suppliers. So you, you effectively sold the product before you had it.

Well, we actually had it on both ends because Jennifer, my business partner, had spent the last several years directing a nonprofit called NC Choices that was in deep relationship with the farmers and the processors in that world and trying to help them figure out how to connect, how to develop supply chains. And so was doing the same or similar work in a nonprofit capacity and became convinced, oh, there's a need here for a middle business.

Yeah.

And so that was a huge part of our success too, on the supply chain side was she was a known entity, a trusted entity. She had already helped these folks a ton of. And. And then that also helped us get some early funding that was nonprofit or sort of grant funding so that the farmers knew, hey, we're going to get paid. They have money.

Yeah, yeah.

So that, that was the other side of the business that allowed us to kind of have relationships on that side of things.

So you, you had the demand side pretty well, or you had the supply side pretty well circled up going into it. And the thesis was, is there actually a demand side for this? And that's where. That's where you plugged in.

Is there demand side and is there a willingness to pay that supports a middle business?

Yeah. One of the things that I've always, like, been impressed about you and your business is that you're doing it on hard mode. Software is easy, comparatively. Like, it's got its problems and it's really, actually really hard. Same with services. It's different. But you've got a physical product that's perishable, that's got regulatory issues around it. You know, you can't sit on it for very long and you've got a really complicated supply chain. Like, how long did it take for you to stitch all of this together? And how has it changed over the past, you know, 15 years that you've been building this business?

We probably spent a year in business planning mode and pulling together funding and figuring out the financial model and the supply. The supply chain elements. And. And then it was interesting getting ready for this conversation. I look back. Yeah. Who is customer one number one, who is customer number 10? And how many customers did we get our first year versus our second year? And it was so interesting to me and like, you know, I literally flipped through the invoices for like the first year or two of the business to see what that looked like. And for the first few months it's the same five customers just over and over again. We're just like learning how to do this.

Yeah.

And then my customer number 10 was Bull City Burger and Brewery. And Bull City Burger continues to be our largest and most important restaurant customer. And but that was when we really started to prove our value proposition. It's like to ourselves and to the restaurant community. Because Seth knew he. So Seth is one of the owners and founders of Pool City Burger and Brewery. He knew he wanted to open a burger restaurant, but only if it was serving local sustainably sourced meats. And he thought he was gonna do that work on his own. Of the sourcing.

Yeah.

And started to try and do that work and quickly realized, oh crap, that's like a whole other business. I have to like know farmers, know how old their animals are and know processors and negotiate pricing and logistics and scheduling. And he was trying to do all that and quickly realized like need to open up restaurants. And we were hearing about each other because we at the time we were working in Bull City Forward in which was like a co working space and incubator space in downtown. And so people kind of knew what we were up to. People knew what he was up to and they're like, you guys need to talk. And boy did we need to talk because he needed exactly what we were building ourselves to do. And in beef, beef animals are so large and such a huge percentage of each beef animal is ground beef or grind cuts to make ground beef. And so if you're going to grow a meat business, you need some anchor beef. And so here's our anchor customer and here's his sort of supply chain logistics work. And it was just this perfect little partnership. And. And like the best illustration of our value proposition that you could have in terms of why, why should you source from us and how are we expanding? Because there were restaurants in Durham and around the Triangle that were buying direct from farmers. We had no interest in replacing that and. But we wanted to expand. Who considered it a possibility? Like, because certain folks were just not going to do it because the one farmer was not going to have enough for them to put something on their menu year round or to keep it as a fresh product. Farmers, they're selling whole animals like we are. They got to freeze stuff to manage their inventory. They might not have year round production. So yeah, I was like, okay people, this is the perfect illustration of our value proposition. And folks are Starting to really see where we're adding value and adding market access.

Yeah, yeah. So you are really close to your customers, as in you. You are at their farms and you rub their little snouts on the little piggies. Right. Like, you, like, know them and know their kids and know their animals and it's always.

Yeah, that's one of the best parts about this work, is all the relationships and how long standing and deep they are.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. What do you remember feeling during that sort of first few years? Like, I know you had a young family and just a lot going on and there's a lot of uncertainty and certainly, like incredible complexity and like just making it work at the tiniest scale, let alone scaling it up the way that you have. Like what. What do you remember feeling as the business owner and leader during that time?

That's a good question. I just. Yeah, it was. It was invigorating. I remember just being like, sort of wide open. There was always a problem to solve. There was always some new thing to figure out. And it was exciting because. And also Durham is just such a supportive community of entrepreneurship in general. But particularly at that time, this farm to fork work was so. It was. There was so much demand for what we were doing and so much excitement about what we were doing. And so you really felt so much support, which made all that problem solving, you know, exciting instead of overwhelming because you knew that it was going to be worth it.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess it does help to incubate a meat business in a, like, exploding dining scene. Yeah.

I mean, our timing. Our timing could not have been better. There was a long stretch of time when I just felt like the stars were always aligning for us. Like our interesting timing around where the Durham restaurant community was and where it was going and the Triangle restaurant community in general. It was. It all was really fortuitous in a lot of ways.

Yeah. So I guess. When did you know it was going to work? Was it the first time the stars are aligned or was it like the 100th time the stars aligned?

It's so funny because. Yeah, I don't know that I like, lift my head up to ask that question too many times. In the early days, it was just like, go, go, go, hustle, hustle. And we, we launched. We also just like, there was so much we didn't know that we didn't know. And I remember launching and like, we didn't even really have a great cold storage solution. We launched business. We were friendly with Cliff's Meat Market and he had some coolers and he was like, you guys can store the meat here. We're like, great, we'll do that. And that didn't work very long at all. And so it was just, it was always pivoting and solving, you know, figuring it out how and making it work. And there wasn't. Yeah, there wasn't a ton of opportunity to look up and think about it. There were tons of like, for the first few years we were demand driven and supply constrained. So there were points when the supply challenges were overwhelming. And I know we made Seth at Bull City so nervous that we weren't gonna have enough beef for him at certain times or that we weren't gonna pull through and meet his needs. And yeah, like, you can't just have.

Like a reserve cow like that. That's the thing that's like always blown me away is that, have you. Did you guys like build software to manage this? Like, how do you know that your network of 50 or however many farmers, how do you know what they have coming and how do you verify that and how do you ensure it lands in the right places with your network of restaurants and grocery stores and retailers and everywhere else that you guys, I.

Mean, production planning is a big part of. So we, our business model is what the USDA calls a food hub. And there are food hubs like ours all over the country. We're one of the few that's exclusively focused on meat. So a lot of these conversations ran about produce, but it's the same, same problem of production planning and scheduling. But for us, we. It's all, I fantasize about software and I could probably help somebody design some really good software. But a lot of spreadsheets. Yeah, we do have an inventory management software, but in terms of the production planning, it's a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of conversations. And then also because most of our farmers have been with us from day one and they have sort of their annual cycles, they know when they're calving, they know when those calves are going to be weaned, they know when they're going to be finished. And so there's some nice sort of repetitive nature to it. But yeah, we're talking to folks about when they're calving. We have a sense of how long it takes to get an animal to finish weight. But these are two year out commitments. So like we are already talking about 20, 26 commitments.

Okay.

And so like we are, for the first time in a decade, we are losing producers because folks are aging out and figuring out secession plans for their farms. And we're actively seeking new producers right now. And we're going out, we're visiting farms, we're figuring out are there systems, what we need is their quality where we need it. But we can't make, we won't see any beef from them until 2026 because that's the, that's how long it takes to raise a beef animal.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's a lot of trust, a lot of, you know, committing to each other different things way far in advance. And that's why, like, doing what we said we're going to do is key. We have to pay people what we said on time, never cancel on animals because the whole thing falls apart as soon as you. These folks are taking big risks and making big commitments to you, like for down the road. And if you pull out, they've. They've let go of all their other options. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How have you changed as a person building this business and, and running it the way that you have with the values that you have?

Yeah, I mean, I think I really learned the power of business in terms of like, to make a difference in the world. Like being just this idea of having an intention going out and making it happen like that, that's something you can do. And like, how exhilarating that is. And like. And early on I was blown away by the power of branding. I could not believe that people would read a new a press release about what we were doing and our intention and our goals for the business and show up and wait in line for an hour for a sausage just based on a story we were telling. I couldn't believe it. So that really blew me away in the early days.

And well, they. And then they were really good sausages. And they still are really good sausages.

Yeah, they're still the same sausages. And people, people get attached. Um, but yeah, it's like. And what's been so great too is like, I've been able to learn and lean into different sort of learnings throughout the time. So, you know, we went from branding to operations and supply chain development. And all the learning there about this all just comes down to people and relationships and how you treat people and how you communicate with people. Like that is the crux of the whole model ultimately. And then, um, now as. As the supply chain stuff has become more sort of foundational in there, we really were able to turn to what being a good employer and what it means to have a business that works and that is data Driven and where people want to be a part of the team and. And can are bringing their ideas to you and bringing the problems to you. And that's been a huge learning for me. And I love sharing that stuff with other business owners because it's like it's not. It doesn't come natural. You need systems and you need tools and routines and figuring out what those are and how to make them work for you is. I really like that part of it too.

Sure, sure. Where. What's next for you? I mean, you got. You guys are easily in over 100 restaurants and retailers all over North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina. Like what's, what's the next phase for you.

Right now? This last year has been the new opportunities for us have been around schools. The federal government has been providing funding for public schools to do local sourcing. A lot of this focus on. They've also been providing support for food banks to do local sourcing. And a lot of that energy and ideas came out of the pandemic of realizing the insecurity of dominant supply chains for meat and wanting to make investments in these more localized, regionalized supply chains so that if the shit hits the fan again, there's food going to food banks and there's food going to schools. And so we've been leaning into those relationships and those are great for us and hope to continue to. And figuring out how to hold on to institutional customers. They can be a little fickle, but they're a key part of scaling this work. So how do we get the Aramarks of the world, the university dining halls, to like really build this in to what they're committed to doing? We're always, you know, we do a little bit of direct to consumer sales. It's about 2% of our business right now. We're always sort of like teetering on. Do we really lean into that side of the business? I think there's a lot of demand for it. It's just not what we built ourselves to do. And it's a different model, it's a different cost structure and figuring out the distribution delivery side of that shipping and. But that's always sort of a lingering like out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because yeah, I think that's a frustration point for people who really do consumers who really value what we're doing. It's like, well, where can I get it? Like Weaver Street, Durham Co Op market. There's not a ton of retail presence for folks or ease of retail presence. And so how do we create that? I think that's the real opportunity.

Yeah, that's great. I have one more question for you, but I also have, like, a confession to make. You are known in our house as Meat Tina. Anytime, like, we eat firsthand food, either at a restaurant or at home or whatever. It's like, this is from Meet Tina.

That's hilarious.

So, yeah, even today, like, I was like, oh, yeah, talking to my wife, I said, oh, yeah, Kelly, I'm. I'm chatting with Meet Tina today. She's like, oh, tell her hey, da, da, da. That's funny. You know, talk about branding. You might want to think about Meet Tina as like a public Persona for.

You because some kind of handle for something.

Yeah, yeah, like, it totally works for my family. All right, well, we, we can wrap up. My, My. My wrap up question is a music recommendation because I have a voracious music appetite and this is just a fun thing to talk about and hear what people listen to. So what do you listen to?

Yeah, I feel like when I see you out and about, it's usually at a show like His golden messenger or something.

Oh, yeah, there's a his poster right here over my shoulder.

Very nice. So this is for the Gen X hip hop lovers out there who might be feeling a little out of touch with the hip hop scene right now. But I recently discovered Dochi. She has a new album out and so she's kind of making the rounds. She was on Colbert Report and she was on Tiny Death's concert, and she is somehow pulling off this, like, real throwback, old school feel to the music while also being extremely fresh and creative and fun and new sounding. So I was delighted to discover Dochi.

Awesome. How do you spell it?

D, O, E, C, H, I, I.

All right, Clearly I am not cool because I just asked how to spell it, but I will give it a listen. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that is meet Tina, co founder of First Hand Foods. Thank you, Tina.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody for listening to this episode of the 11000 Show. I'm your host, Eric Boggs. Thank you to our production team of Rachel Velasquez and Danny Chiu, research team of Benjamin Rogerson and Heine Blargwood. Screaming in the intro and outro provided by the Boggs children, Thomas, Catherine and Barbara. We'll see you next time.

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