WINKLER, Man., – On its first day in business, Spenst Brothers Premium Meats had a problem: there was a lineup at the till and the counter staff couldn’t keep up with the customers.
Paul Spenst, whose family owns the store, couldn’t have been happier.
“I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t know if only a couple of people would come through the doors,” he said, taking a brief break from a hectic day of selling meat, most of it produced on his family’s farm.
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Across the Prairies, farm families have looked for ways to make up for the losses caused by closing the U.S. border to Canadian cattle after BSE, but few have moved as far down the supply chain as the Spensts.
They own the cows, they feed the steers and heifers, they process the meat and they sell it over the counter in a brand-new butcher shop in Winkler, right across the street from a big new Superstore.
So far, neither BSE nor the giant grocery competitor has fazed them.
“Superstore means traffic and traffic means customers if we can attract them and customers mean money,” said Paul’s father Garry about why they decided to go head-to-head with Superstore’s meat counter.
The only part of the supply chain the Spenst family does not control is slaughter and that’s OK with them.
“I’d rather not deal with the blood and the waste,” Garry said.
At one point the family wanted to build an all-in-one slaughter-process-retail facility in Winkler’s industrial park, but after the city objected to the slaughter component they decided to farm it out to a local plant.
Homegrown and marketed
On this day the gleaming meat counter cabinets were full of rich red beef cuts and farmer sausage, all derived from 18 of their cattle and locally purchased pork sides.
Garry said the family would be happy if the store could sell the meat from two of their cattle a day. When BSE struck and the border slammed shut, the Spenst farm had 150 cows. Now it has 300 because the family didn’t want to give away its cows for nothing and its heifers for little.
“You can’t afford to ship to Alberta,” Garry said.
From a herd of 400 cattle three years ago, the Spensts now have 900 head on their land, most of which spend the summer on the community pasture.
The Spensts eased into retail by selling custom killed and cut cattle from their herd to friends and family. When it became impossible to find local plants kill and cut, Garry decided to convert the home garage into a small plant.
“Three days later I gave up on that because I didn’t want to wreck our family home.”
The family considered building a plant in the farmyard, but “there would have been flies in the summer, and that’s not good.”
As a result they decided to build the plant in Winkler.
After buying the lot across from Superstore, the family did most of the construction work and got ready for business.
As busy as it was, the family members seemed happy that the market for fresh meat in Winkler is as strong as they suspected it would be.
Paul, 29 years old, is going to run the store, while his brother Gareth, 25, will run the farm, which includes cattle and 1,400 acres of cropland.
Garry will work “wherever one of them needs me.”
During seeding, when all three men might be needed on the farm, 30-year-old daughter Leora will take command of the butcher shop.
Garry said he and his wife, Connie, while heavily involved in setting up the business, don’t want to take the lead in running it.
“My wife and I have worked hard all of our lives and there’s going to be a time when we’d like to slow down,” said Garry, who is 52.
