Meat processor diversifies to rely less on beef

Death and the subsequent processing are the parts of the beef industry people don’t really like to think about, especially when they’re sinking their teeth into a juicy hamburger at a summer cookout. With most people buying their beef on white foam plates covered in plastic wrap, it’s easy to forget that 2.81-pound chuck roast was once part of a 1,400-pound living, mooing animal. Rice, however, will always remember where his steak comes from.

Tim Rice’s father, Jim Rice, founded the business in 1974 after leaving a sales position at Eli Lilly. Tim Rice grew up in the business, graduated from Wabash College and worked for Perdue Foods for nine years before returning. He and his mother are among the business’s nine employees, who process about 12 to 15 beef cows and about 20 hogs, lambs and goats a week.

Being such a small facility, most of the work is done by hand, as opposed to larger facilities where much of the process is mechanized. That means after a cow is killed, eviscerated, halved and cured for two weeks, someone will take a saw and cut it into quarters. From there the primers, as they’re called, are divided into individual cuts of meat based on the specifications of each individual customer. Whatever usable meat isn’t separated into steaks and roasts is usually ground for hamburger.

But there’s more to the processing business than the actual processing. Rice is part of a larger industry that can be affected by everything from the temperature outside to foreign economies. Both of those things have combined with other factors to drive current beef prices to historic highs.