In the historic “Last Chance Gulch” district in Helena, Mont., a local cooperative is expanding their reach to customers by opening a restaurant, “The Union,” which features a wood-fire grill and beef grown on the co-op member ranches. The new building also features a butcher shop selling “old world-style charcuterie and smoked meats, served simply with seasonal pickles and preserves, fresh breads,” alongside “local beef, lamb, and pork.”
The restaurant is an expansion of the Old Salt Co-op that also has a burger restaurant inside the Gold Bar that features products from the co-op’s four ranches.
The move towards reaching out to customers on a culinary level is part of the business strategy to “do for meat what microbrews have done for beer,” said founder Cole Mannix.
“The goal is to move livestock from Montana ranches trying to diversify that share common values about land stewardship,” Mannix said. “It’s our sense that a lot of meat brands are built around the cowboy hat, but we want our product to look like the customers as much as the rancher.”
The Old Salt Co-op structure currently has four ranches that share ownership: Sieben Livestock Company, Mannix Family Ranch, J Bar L Ranches and LF Ranch. However, Mannix said the group is hoping to grow in the future.
“We aspire to have up to 20 ranches in the co-op,” he said, noting that there is plenty of market as only two percent of the beef consumed in Montana is grown in Montana.
In addition to the two restaurants and the butcher shop, Old Salt also hosts an annual festival at the Mannix family ranch in Helmsville, Mont., which features cooking demonstrations, musicians, workshops about ranching and land stewardship and, of course, food featuring Old Salt meats.
Taking the leap into owning restaurants and hosting festivals was a big step, but the fresh approach is what Mannix and his team are hoping will be a new way of selling direct to the consumer.
People are also reading…
“We had the sense that many people’s experiences of buying direct from a rancher was getting frozen beef in a parking lot, which isn’t that sexy,” he said. “I grew up on one of the co-op ranches and we didn’t have the skillset to make meat sexy. We knew it was going to take a community of people.”
To help bring a new style to meat marketing, Mannix paired with chef Andrew Mace. Mannix said Mace worked for 15 years in kitchens in Porland before joining the Old Salt team in 2021.
Boost from state grant
The Old Salt Co-op recently got a boost to their efforts via a state Growth Through Agriculture (GTA) grant of $50,000. Mannix said the funds will be used to purchase equipment to continue to develop their value-added product line. A vacuum stuffer and twist linker for the sausages, as well as potentially a better smoker, are on the list of items the grant will help fund.
The GTA program was established by the Montana Legislature in 1987 to strengthen and diversify Montana’s agriculture industry through development of new agricultural products and processes.
In addition to bolstering their value-added infrastructure, Old Salt is working on having a USDA processing facility up and running by this fall.
“Old Salt is establishing its own vertically integrated processing in the Helena area, which can handle multiple species for both custom-exempt and USDA-inspected meat products,” the co-op shared on their website. “In addition to processing for its own brand, Old Salt will offer centrally located processing services for ranches in the region that currently lack sufficient access.”
As the co-op continues in their efforts, Mannix said they always have the customer in mind.
“We want to provide an experience of the food we are raising,” he concluded.