In the space of a year, Bruce Daum has resurrected the flagging fortunes of Manitoba’s Berkshire hog industry and made crucial inroads into the New York market for high-end food.
By developing personal relationships with buyers through in-person visits, the former Berkshire hog producer from Brandon has arranged for 125 of the heritage breed pigs to be shipped weekly to an eastern seaboard broker beginning June 1.
“You can’t find markets sitting on the phone. You have to be out there meeting people,” said Daum, who grew up on a farm in Manitoba and later worked in the “sell or starve” Toronto autoglass business.
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“The guy in New York, I flew down there three times to meet him.”
Daum’s strategy for marketing the Berkshire, which has been a favourite of British royalty for three centuries and was once presented to Japan as a diplomatic gift, has been to hook the “foodies” first.
“If you get the high-end chefs involved, they start getting press. Then the wholesalers want the product,” he said.
Last July he organized an industry-only event called the “Naked Pig” at Hanlan’s Point, a clothing-optional beach on Toronto Island, North America’s largest car-free community, where the meat was served free to 250 chefs, dishwashers, prep cooks and servers.
“We put up tents and had bands. It was a great party. Renting the island for the afternoon alone was $8,000.”
Daum also convinced the owners of Winnipeg’s top-rated Bistro 71/4 to host a special invitation-only Berkshire pork party this past March for chefs interested in regional cooking. The event was featured prominently in local newspapers.
The owner of Berkshire MB began carving out a marketing niche for Berkshires in April 2006 after obtaining a $28,000 Manitoba Rural Adaptation Council grant to promote new marketing channels for the breed, which is typically raised outdoors on straw bedding. However, the lion’s share of the cost has been borne by Daum, who said he has invested roughly $70,000 into the project.
Daum is driven by his belief that there is a premium market for straw-raised, antibiotic-and growth hormone-free pigs. Once people try it, he said, the meat sells itself.
“On a Berkshire, the fat is sweet. When I’m trimming a piece of meat, I’ll cut off little squares and put it in the toaster oven and get it to crackle. I’ll eat the fat; it is just phenomenal,” said Daum. “Berkshire meat is dark like Angus and it’s marbled all the way through.”
Until this spring, about 500 finishers were raised in the province each year, slaughtered at Springhill Farms in Neepawa, Man., and shipped to Saskatchewan Specialty Meats where the carcasses were processed.
About 80 percent of the Berkshire meat was exported to Japan until the government introduced country-of-origin labelling for locally produced “kurobuta,” which means “black pig” in Japanese.
With that export market lost, and hit hard by the rising Canadian dollar and higher feeding costs, Daum was forced to dump his Berkshire feeders into the white pig market.
“I think I lost about $40,000,” he said. “That was just when the market got hammered.”
He said white pig buyers heavily downgrade black, hairy pigs because of their smaller loins and thicker backfat.
The next step will be to increase the weekly eastern shipment size to 250, which would be a full truckload, and then 500, if enough pigs are available. He is concerned there might not be enough Berkshires left in Manitoba to fill larger orders.
The pork retails for $9 to $10 a pound, and sells for up to $40 per pork chop in restaurants. As a buyer, Daum offers producers $12 per hundredweight above the U.S. Department of Agriculture weekly price. The pigs are shipped to a killing plant in Ontario, where cuts for the Toronto market are stripped off as needed and the rest shipped to the New York broker.
Future plans might include branching into other premium meat, such as bison, which he said now lacks a strong local marketer.
