Five Iowa meat goat producers have gotten together and started their own brand of packaged goat meat they are marketing directly to retailers and through retail grocers. They are coordinating contract slaughter and packaging as well as doing their own distribution to various stores in several cities in Iowa. The producers also do their own in-store promotion and customer education, a key factor in their success.

Goat Meat Brand for Iowa Healthy Edge Meats

Though Iowa certainly has an ethnic market for goat meat products, the group has tailored a premium line for the mainstream population. The vacuum packaged cuts chops, roasts, cubed meat and ground meat are branded Heartland Pride, a division of their operating company, Healthy Edge Meats, LLC.

“We’re a group of five farmers who raise meat goats,” Lapke said. “We knew that goat meat was in demand from people from other cultures but we also thought it might be a good alternative product with traditional Americans because it’s so extremely low in calories, fat and cholesterol . . .  We decided to go for it.”

Through a lot of hard work over the past year and a half the group has managed to place their premium goat product with many retailers throughout Iowa.
It is sold in several grocery stores including, notably, the HyVee chain’s supermarkets in Ames, Bettendorf, Cedar Falls, Cedar Rapids, Clinton, Coralville, Davenport, Dubuque, Marshalltown, Muscatine, and Waterloo, Iowa, as well as Moline, Ill., and Rochester, Minn. In Iowa’s largest city, Des Moines, Heartland Pride products are sold in Dahl’s supermarket.

“We actually started processing goats last fall. Our products started being handled in retail grocery stores in, I think, February—when we got it in our first store. Most of the time they put our product in the health market or in the frozen section by the specialty meats,” Lapke said.

The idea of marketing premium goat cuts came from former dairy farmer Gary Steinlage of West Union, Iowa, in the northeast corner of the state, Lapke said. Steinlage has a feed business and raises meat goats.

“Gary used to have a dairy farm and raised some goats on the side and sold his goats for meat to some of his employees,” Lapke said. “And they had requested parts of the goat instead of the whole goat. He came up with the idea of selling the meat versus the live goat.” Steinlage recruited Lapke to help in the effort. They joined forces with Kate Johnson of Rolfe, Iowa, who took up raising meat goats as her retirement job, and Jay Farmer of Strawberry Point, Iowa. Also a partner in the venture is Lapke’s son, Grant Lapke, age 14.

“Grant is part of the business,” Lapke said. “He owns goats himself and gets involved in promotion. He’s at our board meetings and helps make some of the decisions.”

The five goat farmers each keep their own herds and sell the goats they choose to send to slaughter to their company,  Healthy Edge Meats, LLC. Then the company contracts with Edgewood Locker, a well known USDA inspected meat processor to slaughter a batch of goats and process them into packaged cuts.

“A lot of people in Iowa take their deer to Edgewood Locker to get done because they have a reputation of doing such a great job,” Lapke said.

“We’re mostly doing premium cuts,” she said. “We’re doing chops, roasts, round, ground patties. We have this thing called a chop on a stick and then we also have some meat sticks and things like that. We also do some carcasses and half carcasses. All of those things are our premium line.”

The meat sticks are shelf stable snacks. “Sort of like a pepperoni stick but they’re goat,” Lapke said.

The company has another line they call their consumer line, consisting mostly of whole carcasses slaughtered in halal fashion for Muslim consumers. A lot of the goats slaughtered for the consumer line are billy kids from dairy goat farms.

In northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, southwest Wisconsin, and northwest Illinois there are a lot of dairy goat farmers. A recent expansion in the dairy goat industry in the area means an excess of dairy billy kids and the Healthy Edge Meats consumer line gives those producers a market for their young buck kids.

“Now they can sell them and make a little money on them. Some of them are keeping them and raising them and selling them to us and some are selling them to other farmers that will eventually sell them to us,” Lapke said.

Healthy Edge Meats’ premium line slaughter goats must be fullblood or percentage meat goat—Boer goat or Spanish goat, Lapke said.  They are grain fed and slaughtered at 60 to 80 pounds, about 4 to 6 months of age.

All Healthy Edge Meats products are distributed by the partners in the venture—they take them to the stores, Lapke said.

How did they manage to convince the retailers to carry their products? It required a lot of visiting stores and meat market managers and bringing samples, Lapke said. “It takes three or four visits  per store. But it seems to fit because it’s a locally grown product, which is something that’s popular right now. It’s very nutritious and it’s also something thats desirable to other cultures.” Many retailers are needing to provide products to serve those markets, she said.

HyVee is their top retailer and has more than 200 stores in the Midwest.

“We thought it was a good target. As we would add a HyVee store we would go and talk to others and the meat managers would talk among themselves,” she said.
Once they have the store’s agreement to try the product, the Healthy Edge Meats partners spend a lot of effort on in-store promotion including serving cooked samples to shoppers and providing recipes and cooking instructions as well as nutrition information to potential consumers. 

How do shoppers react to taste test samples? “Most people find that it tastes very good and when they look at the nutrition information they’re really pleased,” Lapke said. “We do a lot on the weekends, going into the store and handing out samples.” She added that her four children often go with her to help out.

“We call it Chevon. Some people don’t like it. But I would say that 90 percent of the people who try it are pleasantly surprised and like it.”

For more information, visit the Healthy Edge Meats, LLC, website:  www.iowahealthyedgemeats.com .