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The stand-up freezer in Kasey Guentert’s tidy garage in central Texas is chock-full of vacuum-wrapped cuts of beef.
The meat is well-organized, with roasts on the top row and ground beef below. The third row is reserved for her favorite cut – a whole trove of tenderloin steaks.
“Is that not the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” Guentert asks, running her hands over a pile of frozen 4-ounce tenderloins.
Guentert ordered the beef from Bastrop Cattle Company, a ranch roughly 75 miles east of where she lives in Canyon Lake. The company offers whole and half cows, as well as custom bulk beef boxes.
Ranchers are seeing more demand for bulk orders, especially as the cost of steaks and hamburgers at the grocery store hover near record highs. And while it typically costs thousands of dollars to buy in bulk, the elevated cost of retail beef is making it a better deal.
Guentert most recently bought a package of 150 pounds of beef for $1,885 (plus tax). She and her partner eat beef about five nights per week, but this single order will last them more than a year.
“The upfront cost is a little painful, but it is worth it in the long run. But you're not going to see beef probably for a good year to year and a half on your grocery bill,” said Guentert, “and that makes a huge difference. So honestly, I think it's the only way to go and this is the way I will buy my beef from now on.”
Supporting local ranchers has traditionally been a big driver for bulk beef customers. Many also like knowing exactly where their meat comes from and having a stable source of it, according to Drew Kientzy, an agriculture business specialist with University of Missouri Extension.
“Folks were actually willing to pay premiums for the direct consumer freezer beef. Knowing where it came from, being able to have that connection with the producer,” Kientzy said.
The higher price of buying local beef wasn’t solely because of quality and service. Smaller cattle operations pay more than big meatpackers to process, package and ship their food. And those costs get passed onto the customer.
But as beef has gotten more expensive at the supermarket, some people are paying less per pound when they buy in bulk.
“Right now, on the consumer side, there’s a little advantage to buying freezer beef,” Kientzy said.
Cultivating an industry
Buying meat straight from the farm is not a new concept. But the industry gained steam in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Grocery stores couldn’t keep their coolers stocked, and people wanted to know they’d have a stable meat supply, said Erin Beyer, assistant professor and extension meat science specialist at Kansas State University.
“When it all boomed, we were getting lots of calls at the time of, ‘Do you know anywhere that has [bulk beef]?’” she said.
The demand was overwhelming, according to Beyer. Some producers didn’t have an adequate website to take orders, or enough processing or cold storage capacity nearby. Customers waited months for their meat.
But now, the infrastructure to support bulk beef has caught up with the market.
“Those systems are much more robust now,” Beyer said. “[Ranchers] have a really good system of selling those products and marketing those products, better today than they did five years ago.”
Bastrop Cattle Company, where Guentert bought her beef, started selling directly to consumers during the pandemic. Before that, the company mostly sold to restaurants.
“We were able to sell to the public, and we had a decent website. And so, ever since then, it’s kind of just been direct-to-customer only,” said Max Kruemke, one of the company’s owners.
He said customers pick how much beef they want, decide how they want it cut – with Kruemke’s help – and then pay one fee. That’s a simpler process than it used to be.
“You’d buy the cow from the rancher live weight, then go to the butcher and it would turn into a hanging weight, which is with all the inedible parts removed,” Kruemke said. “Then you’d pay a processing fee, pay a kill fee, give cutting instructions.”
‘We did the numbers’
Kruemke was surprised when a customer told him that Bastrop Cattle Company beef was cheaper than going to the grocery store in the long run.
“I remember the exact moment when somebody said to me, ‘Oh we did the numbers and actually we think it’ll save us money.’ And I was like oh, okay, that’s wild,” he said.
Buying a whole or half cow is no cheap investment – but it may result in some savings.
An animal generally produces about 420 pounds of meat. On average, it costs about $3,900 to order a whole cow from Kruemke’s company at $9.40 per pound. Buying a half cow is a little more expensive per pound.
At the same time, the prices of beef at the grocery store continue to soar, pressured by a small U.S. cattle herd, high input costs and disruptions to international trade.
The average cost of most steak was $12.73 per pound in March, and ground beef was $6.70 per pound – both a 16% increase from a year before, according to the most recent federal price data.
There are caveats to buying meat in bulk: You have to have enough money to pay for the beef up front, a commitment to using all different cuts of meat and a freezer to store it all. Beyer, from Kansas State, said some people who bought a whole cow during the pandemic got more than they bargained for.
“That was a big issue from the beginning. ‘Oh I bought a half of beef or a quarter of beef,’ and then they would get it, and they have one small chest freezer. There’s no way that’s going to fit,” Beyer said.
In Canyon Lake, Kasey Guentert has not penciled out exactly how much money she’s saving by buying in bulk. But she likes how buying a few hundred pounds of beef at a time shields her from fluctuations in price.
“Once you buy it at that price, if it goes up because something’s going on political science wise or whatever,” she said. “My pricing has stayed the same at least for a good year, year and a half.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
