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Certified Organic Beef Producer Grassfat Farm Launches Carnivore Vitamin Supplement Line
George Mylonakis
Founder
Grassfat Farm LLC
Interview conducted by:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFO Magazine
CEOCFO: Mr. Mylonakis, what is the overall vision behind Grassfat Farm and what is your focus right now?
Mr. Mylonakis: Grassfat Farm is the only certified organic beef producer in South Carolina. We also own and operate the only certified organic slaughter house in South Carolina and created the first butcher shop on wheels, to allow us to cut and wrap our organic meats at the local farmers markets right in-
Overall, our goal is to promote regenerative agriculture and organic meats; we do beef, pork, chicken, lamb and occasionally quail. We have recently launched our carnivore vitamin supplement line, which is a beef organ blend that includes the organs, muscle and bone. It is an all around, full spectrum, animal-
CEOCFO: Why organ supplements? Why do we need them?
Mr. Mylonakis: Evolutionary speaking, humans have always eaten all of the parts of the animal. I grew up with my great grandmother who passed away at the age of 104. She would eat the eyeball, the liver, the brain, and as a kid you thought that was funny, and she stayed healthy her whole life. When she was on her deathbed the hospice nurse said she would not recognize me or speak. However, when she saw me she looked in my eyes and said, “Oh, hi George!” So 104, but still sharp as a tack, and I attribute that to an old fashioned diet; she used regular butter, cream in her coffee, salted her food and ate all of the parts of the animal.
There are a lot of different micronutrients that come from the different parts of the animal that we do not get when we are eating a processed diet, such as the average American diet. Most of what we eat is from a small portion of the animal, so you are missing out on a lot of the nutrition that comes from the different parts of the animals like the organs.
CEOCFO: Do the medical community and the health food community understand?
Mr. Mylonakis: Somewhat. I think the awareness is growing because as people started getting, for example, joint and knee problems, we have started to see more and more surgeries and drugs trying to fix all of these different parts of our bodies, but in reality they are deteriorating from poor nutrition. The root cause of many of these problems are because we have micronutrient deficiencies because our diets have changed so dramatically in the last 50 years. Yes, it is more convenient to open a package, stick it in a microwave and eat it, but at best the average American eats chicken and beef, (just the muscle meat, of course) and it is from soy fed animals that are not getting the healthy omegas from the grass or the COQ10 that comes naturally from an herbivore’s diet when they are allowed to eat different plants, grass and leaves. All of the nutrients that we used to get naturally from our food is not being consumed by the average American, and it’s causing a pretty extensive health epidemic.
If we eat as we used to, we would not ned organ supplements; if we were eating the liver and the kidneys, all of the different part of the animals, chew the bone and the fat, we would not need the supplements. However, the average American diet is devoid of these nutrients and the micronutrients that cannot be synthesized and made in a lab. Therefore, you need them from a natural source and that is why these products are becoming more and more popular.
CEOCFO: How did you go from raising animals to manufacturing supplements? What did you need to learn, what were the challenges, what facilities did you need to add?
Mr. Mylonakis: In seeing other products on the market, my first assumption was that it would be as simple as calling a contract manufacturer. However, as I started trying to put the pieces together, while maintaining organic certification, it became clear that these supplements were not being made in this country, and nobody was doing anything close to certified organic. These products are all being made done overseas with no supervision, or third party analysis. It is being done in factories and laboratories that no US regulatory body has ever set foot in. Therefore, we had to develop the process from scratch.
After the slaughter is done under the USDA inspection here in the United States, the next step for us is to send it down for something called, “high pressure processing.” This subjects the meat 87,000 PSI, which is powerful enough to actually crush the bacteria and ensure that it is a sterile product with nothing bad in it. At that point it gets freeze dried, milled into a fine powder, then encapsulated into a pill and bottled.
We had to figure out that process ourselves, and there are no white papers or manuals out there so it took some trial and error. We had to borrow from experts in other areas. We are in Greenwood County, South Carolina, which is the home of Capsugel, now called Lonza, one of the largest capsule makers, and I happen to be acquainted with some former employees, which gave me direct access to people with knowledge of how these processes work. We then figured the rest out on our own, and had had to beg a few vendors to work with us, because as I said, it previously had not been done in this country.
CEOCFO: What is your go to market strategy?
Mr. Mylonakis: We are just getting started. We decided to launch on Amazon, as one of the members of our team had a lot of experience doing product launches on Amazon. We are also doing direct to consumer through our website. We are primarily focused on online channels because it is a niche product. It is not as if there is a particular market in a geographical area where these products appeal to a large portion of the population. Therefore, we decided on a national, online retail-
CEOCFO: How did you decide on the price of your products?
Mr. Mylonakis: We did a backwards analysis on both the cost of what it takes us to produce, and also the pricing of other products already on the market, so basically a cost-
CEOCFO: How do you get all of the great things you offer into a short display or ad, so that people can recognize what Grassfat Farm offers?
Mr. Mylonakis: We highlight the fact that we are farmer owned, we control the entire process and that we are the only certified organic supplement on the market. The whole certified organic thing tells you also what we do not have in our products. I find it humorous that I have to have a license, be regulated and be inspected to prove that we do not do something, when all of the other companies using these chemicals do not need a license to make sure they are not producing products with high chemical residue levels, and there’s no requirement for them to test for that either.
In addition, we have traceability. I can tell you the name of the cow in your bottle. We don’t actually name them, but they do have numbers, so that is the level of traceability that we have. With the other products on the market, one pill could contain a hundred different cow sources, so if there is an issue discovered with one particular animal, it is impossible to trace back to the original cow. The leaves a safety and purity concern and those are the things we highlight in our marketing.
CEOCFO: How did you come up with the right mix of organs?
Mr. Mylonakis: That is an interesting question because in this new vertical it really has not been done in this way. Therefore, we did look at quite a bit of research on both the scientific and medical side, and what competitors were doing. Then we also used a little bit of old fashioned common sense and said, “Let’s take the grandma calculator.” Grandma used to eat the liver, all these other parts of the animals, and then we started to examine the nutritive value, and the bioavailability was off the charts. If you look at the evolutionary track of humans, at what point were we the healthiest? What parts of the animal were we eating then, and what were the proportions in our diet if you were consuming those different products. We tried to proportion the mix of ingredients to what would be a natural proportional diet from an evolutionary standpoint.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us a little more detail about the butchering business?
Mr. Mylonakis: When we started the farm here in South Carolina, we decided to buy a farm that would be certified organic from the start. I live on the farm as well as work there, so we decided that nothing would ever be put on the land so that anything grown there could be certified organic. This also allowed us to have certified organic cows and organic beef, but if I wanted to sell and tell people that we can provide organic steak or ground beef, I realized that we would need a facility to process it, and there were no facilities that could process the meat and have it retain that organic certification. That is because most of these processing facilities use harsh cleaning chemicals on their equipment, and in fact, when the animals come into their facilities they have a chemical that they spray on them to rid the animals of flies. However, you are about to turn this animal into food, and that is really not what you want in your food.
That is when we decided to look into getting our own USDA facility, and after quite a bit of research, I discovered that the easiest route was a mobile USDA slaughter facility. We brought together a group of farmers all through North Carolina and South Carolina, and made a proposal that said that we would like to relocate this preexisting USDA slaughter house from Oregon to South Carolina, then go farm to farm and slaughter animals directly on the farms. In addition, we wanted to do it using certified organic processes and be able to obtain that certification. We were able to get a few folks to partner with us initially; however, it became too expensive to haul a 53 foot tractor trailer and have a truck driver and a butcher all go to the farm. It was more costly than people were willing to pay on a per-
We then decided to sell that larger mobile facility and created a smaller version of it here on the farm that allows us to accomplish the same thing. That is on the slaughter side, which is done under USDA. For most of our cut sales, when we sell a stak, or a chicken thigh, we have a food truck butcher shop. It is actually a trailer that we bring to the Farmers Market, park it, open up the side where it has a big glass window, there is a meat saw, a meat cooler, a grinder and all of these different things. We ask the customer how thick they want their rib eye, we take out the rib primal, put it on the saw and cut it to the thickness that people want. We wrap it and hand it out the window. That brought us quite a bit of notoriety and it was how we established ourselves locally. After that, as we started expanding we got to the point where we have a pretty good following locally. For those folks that want an organic product, which does carry a premium price, they know where to find us. They follow us on Facebook, and when we have an animal that we process and have cuts available we post about it and it sells out pretty quickly.
CEOCFO: Is the mobile slaughter house still a big part of your business today?
Mr. Mylonakis: We do not go around to the Farmers Markets as regularly as we used to, because we are now focused on the supplement side of our business, and we are a small, family-
CEOCFO: Are you seeking funding, investment and partnerships as you continue to grow and roll out or can you handle it by yourselves?
Mr. Mylonakis: We are pretty much self funded. On the supplement side we do have a friend that is a co-
CEOCFO: Who came up with, “Whole Cow no BS?”
Mr. Mylonakis: As we were batting around ideas with our marketing team, I think I said it as a joke, and our CMO said, “Oh my goodness, that needs to be the name of the product.” It just stuck.
CEOCFO: Put it together for our readers. People are always looking for new ideas particularly in the heath arena. Why pay attention to Grassfat Farm?
Mr. Mylonakis: The most important thing about Grassfat Farm is that from the very beginning when we built the brand, everything we did was to build trust with our customers, and transparency is built in by design. Most of our first and most loyal customers found us by going on a farm tour and could see the difference with their own eyes. We want our customers to have that traceability and clarity about where your food comes from, what’s in it, and what isn’t, so people can trust what they are putting in their bodies. When you are taking a supplement or eating a steak, everything that animal eats, gets treated with, or is sprayed with is of the utmost importance.
The Grassfat guarantee is that you know 100% of what that animal did and did not consume, and you know exactly what you are putting in your body. None of our competitors can do that because they never owned the cows and they don’t control the manufacturing process. We are hands-
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