When billionaire Ted Turner got into the bison business, he just wanted to be a banana – one of the bunch.
He had a simplistic, romantic idea about bison, said Russell Miller, general manager of Turner Enterprises. He would buy a ranch, tear out the fences and let the animals do what they wanted.
He bought one bull and two female calves in 1976, put them on a ranch and ended up with more than 70 head.
“We were good at one thing,” Miller told the recent Canadian Bison Association conference in Regina. “Like most ranchers, we were great on the supply side of the equation and we’d let somebody else market them.”
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Turner bought his first ranch, the Bar None in Montana, in 1987. He now has 15 ranches in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota and Oklahoma.
Turner owns about 48,000 head, which is the largest private herd in the world.
However, marketing bison meat turned out to be harder than Turner expected. In 2002, he launched Ted’s Montana Grill.
The chain has grown at a tremendous rate. There were 41 restaurants as of the end of October and at least a dozen more opening in 2006.
“Ted never wanted to be a restaurateur,” Miller said. “He couldn’t sell any bison meat. He thought he would create a rising tide and that rising tide will float a lot of boats.”
The restaurants use about 7,500 head of bison a year. The menu also offers other meat and poultry and Miller said the venture probably wouldn’t survive on bison alone.
Turner’s business partner George McKerrow, who founded Longhorn Steakhouse, initially said he would be surprised if more than 20 percent of patrons ate bison, Miller said.
“Sixty-two percent of the selections were bison,” he added, and despite a premium attached to the meal price of prime cuts such as tenderloin, the number of selections is growing.
The restaurants serve about 90,000 meals a week and Miller said about 55 percent of patrons choose bison.
The irony of Ted’s Montana Grill’s success is that there isn’t a restaurant in Montana.
“There will probably be one in Canada before there is one in Montana,” Miller said, because of the population base. “We are looking at Canada.”
Eleven of the restaurants are in Atlanta.
Turner’s bison are processed at the North American Bison Co-operative and Rocky Mountain Natural Meats.
Miller said the company has no plans to get into the slaughter and processing business.
“You have to focus on the things you do best. We’re not pursuing that vertical integration. We don’t see a need to.”
