Jim Reis always smoked a lot of meat at his home in Adel, Iowa, and one day decided he could make a better bacon than what he could buy at the store. He continued doing that for a few years, then in 2010 he and his wife Rachel decided to try it out at the popular and well-attended Des Moines Farmer’s Market. And that is how Des Moines Bacon & Meat Co. was born. The Reis’ sold out of their bacon every week.

After two years of success at the farmer’s market, The Reis’ decided to take the next step and get their bacon into some local independent grocery stores.

Building a Business

Due to regulations, Jim Reis could not process bacon in his home and sell to retailers. He contacted the state of Iowa and asked what it would take for him to legally sell bacon processed at home. The state official told him it would be difficult, if not impossible and recommended he partner with a small locker plant in the area.

He looked around and in 2012 found State Center Locker in State Center, Iowa, which is now closed.

“They allowed me to develop a label using their state inspection stamp, and then I made my own cures for how I wanted my bacon flavor profile,” Reis said. They applied it and smoked it for me to my specifications and then packed it. So that’s how we got started being able to sell our product.”

Des Moines Bacon & Meat Co. sold to independent grocery stores throughout central Iowa and did well, eventually needing a processing partner that could handle more volume. In 2014, the company moved to California, Mo.-based Burgers’ Smokehouse. After years of success with Burgers’ the partnership ran its course and Des Moines Bacon & Meat began to look for a new co-packing partner.

In 2018, Reis and Des Moines Bacon & Meat Co. began working with Mary Ann’s Specialty Foods Inc., a federally inspected plant in Webster City, Iowa that is still operating today.

“So that’s how we got production from where we started to where we are now,” Reis said.

Currently, Des Moines Bacon & Meat produces roughly 80,000 lbs of bacon a year with two varieties available. It offers a thicker cut, traditional applewood smoked variety along with a nitrate free, uncured product.

The company started with the local independent grocery stores and once it was producing more volume through the Burgers’ partnership, ventured into some of the local HyVee stores and Fareway Markets.

“We never try to take on more than what we can do, so we just would add a few stores as we got comfortable,” Reis said.

And now, after growth over the last five years, foodservice customers have become half of the overall business. Reis said they haven’t pushed for more foodservice customers, but have let it grow on its own.

“They try our bacon and we kind of just get phone calls,” he said. “So, if we can fit them into our route, we will drop it off.”

With the exception of The Other Place, a small chain of Kansas City, Mo. area restaurants with distribution through Sysco, Des Moines Bacon & Meat Co. self distributes all of its products. The slow growth was enough to warrant hiring a sales manager, Jesse Moore, and investing in an additional truck.

“About six years ago, I hired a sales manager, and he kind of took over my current accounts because we were coming into harvest and there was no way I was going to be able to do it all,” Reis said. “After I hired him, we kind of really needed to expand it to pay for a new refrigerated van and pay for him. So, we just kept adding stores, working it where it was manageable and that’s where we are now.”

The company does a small amount of mail order business, which is a challenge due to the expenses involved with shipping meat. Reis tries to keep the mail order business limited to the Midwest to control those costs and has, again, tried to relieve some of the burden through an outside contractor.

“We did end up kind of partnering with a company called WG Provisions, and they’re a pretty good-sized meat mail order company out in Iowa,” he said. They’ve been doing our hams for Christmas for the last three years and that’s been a really good partnership with them because they’re set up for that.”

Behind the scenes

Des Moines Bacon & Meat Co.’s bacon accounts for approximately 30% of its business. It also delivers fresh, never frozen meat that makes up 40% of its business, while the other 30% it calls processed meat. The processed meats portion includes hams, hot dogs, breakfast sausage, Italian sausage, cooked smoked kielbasa and smoked turkey breast that comes from a small turkey farmer in Minnesota.

The fresh meat products include ribs, butt loins and tenderloins, which Reis calls all natural. Mary Ann’s Specialty Foods sources the raw materials for Des Moines Bacon & Meat and there are no label claims on any of the products.

“All natural just means we’re not using any water solution or anything which is sometimes a common practice with ribs and pork butts, and we’re just using the butcher grade bellies.”

Once Mary Ann’s sources the animals and processes Des Moines Bacon & Meat’s product, the company picks it up in its 26-foot Freightliner and takes it to Des Moines Cold Storage where Des Moines Bacon & Meat centralizes all its product.

“It takes off a lot of our responsibility of product management, storage because they’re 24-hour monitoring, it takes a lot of stress off me or worrying about walking my own coolers and stuff like that,” Reis said.

Once product is at the cold storage facility, the refrigerated van picks it up from cold storage to deliver it to customers by either Moore or Reis. The fresh meat that was slaughtered on Wednesday is always delivered to customers no later than the following Friday, and sometimes even the same day as slaughtered.

Currently, Des Moines Bacon & Meat serves roughly 100 retail stores in Des Moines to about 30 miles outside the city. It travels east on I-80 delivering to locations on its way to Iowa City, serving stores in Iowa City as well, then heads north to Cedar Rapids. Moore is currently maxed out on what he can get done in a week.

“I would love to do, let’s say, Fort Dodge, to the northwest of here, but to justify that I need another truck, another driver, and we have to develop enough stops to justify another person for that route,” Reis said. “I’m at a crossroads of do we hire another person and work on another market, whether it’s send a truck to Omaha and work the western side of the state. Explore partnering with our current grocery stores and try to get it into the warehouse where at that point we basically drop ship them a pallet and they distribute it for us. That’s kind of where we’re right at the crossroads. So, expanding our business, which route we need to go. We’re exploring both options.”

The team at Des Moines Bacon & Meat Co. includes Jim and Rachel Reis, and Moore. Jim Reis acts as a salesman as well. Being a full-time farmer and a full-time bacon and meat processor means the small team, and Reis specifically, are spread thin throughout the year, so label and design, bookkeeping, processing, part-time drivers to deliver hams during the holiday rush and cold storage are all contracted out.

“Instead of me taking on everything, I just contract out what we need,” Reis said.

Practicing patience

Since 2008, the city of Des Moines has held it Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival. Every year about 10,000 people show up to enjoy and celebrate bacon at the festival. Des Moines Bacon & Meat has won best bacon eight times during its participation in the event. It’s an example of how much bacon lovers enjoy the company’s product, and their loyalty and support drive Des Moines Bacon & Meat to thrive and continue to grow, even though being a small company can be challenging.

Large and very large bacon producers possess the resources that small producers do not. The ability to put products on sale and sell at a loss and still compete in the market, offers great advantages over the smaller, boutique style bacon makers. But Des Moines Bacon & Meat built its business in a way that offers advantages too.

“Most of the people around Des Moines kind of know who we are, and they support us,” Reis said. “We’ve seen that when something does go on sale, our numbers really don’t drop. That means our customers are still supporting us and they’re not buying 100% on price.”

Being a commodity, the price of pork bellies fluctuates over the course of a year, Reis tries to maintain a consistent price through the whole year, regardless. There are times during the year when margins get thin, but the effort to price consistently helps the company avoid sticker shock.

“I’ve been doing this long enough that I have an idea of what the price is going to be throughout the year, and that we can get to a price point where even though it’s lean, we stay where we’re at,” Reis said. “So, it all kind of equals out throughout the year where we want to be to keep the lights on.”

Reis’ original plan was for Des Moines Meat & Bacon to operate out of its own, small, licensed facility, but the cost of that was too prohibitive. While things at the present are very busy and the current staff is too small for any expansion, let alone a new project of a company facility, the idea is still there.

In Reis’ vision, the company would start with its own boutique-style bacon shop. He’s not exactly sure what the shop would look like. Jim and Rachel Reis are in the process of moving to a new property with the space to accommodate such a shop, and that is part of the reason for the move.

“That’s my goal and then probably work with some of the local restaurants that are looking for some unique menu items that we can do.”

Larger facilities that need to adhere to stricter production schedules do not have the ability to do a change over for a quick, small run of product that might interest a local restaurant. In a smaller specialty shop, Des Moines Bacon & Meat would be able to do those kinds of production runs much more easily.

“In a smaller facility, that I would have, we could work and try different things easier and come up with new menu items that may work for them,” Reis said. “That’s kind of what my vision is.”