In 1962, Alvin Joyce founded a small chicken wholesale business that supplied small mom-and-pop type retailers in Lewisville, NC. In 1971, Alvin’s son, Ron Joyce went to work with his father at what was then called Joyce Foods. Ten years later Ron Joyce purchased the company from his father. Then in 2008, Ron’s son Ryan joined the family business, followed by his brother Stuart in 2010, making the company, a few years later renamed Joyce Farms, a third-generation family-owned business.

Ron Joyce remains actively involved with Joyce Farms as the chairman of the board with son Ryan Joyce, president and chief executive officer and son Stuart, serving as the executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Product and process

Today the company operates out of Winston-Salem, NC, and facilities include a company-owned poultry farm with both chickens and turkeys, a poultry processing and distribution facility (built in 1991) and hatchery (added in 2016). In addition, the company contracts out another nine farms throughout North Carolina and Georgia.

Joyce Farms’ processing facility covers 45,000 square feet with 30,000 square feet used for slaughtering, processing, storage, etc., and the remaining used for office space. It employs approximately 100 people operating two shifts. Its Heritage line, which includes Poulet Rouge chicken, Pintade Fermiere hens and Heritage Black Turkey are slaughtered at the facility. The plant processes just under 8,000 birds per week.

The Naked line includes chicken, various chicken sausages, duck and rabbit. The volume and demand are high and continue to grow at a rate that exceeds the plant’s slaughter capacity.

“We partner with these other larger producers that meet our growing and raising standards,” said Ryan Joyce. “That line comes in here and we further process it; and it’s all no antibiotics as well.”

Stuart added, “Once that product gets here, that’s really where the magic happens because we’re still hand sizing. We don’t use the DSI or a water jet cutter, the portion of every single piece of our cutlets are hand sized. We’re not using automated equipment, so we can really dial into the consistency and the quality.”

While Joyce Farms focuses on hand cutting, it does use some machines to ensure efficiency. An automated picker and tumble scalder prepare carcasses on the kill side. The company still has a lung gun for evisceration but pulling the viscera is still a manual cut. For bird sizing, Joyce Farms uses Marel equipment that can size using paddles and gates to sort by size and weight. The cone line is semi-automated and moves, but employees break down front halves and whole birds.

“Everything in those processes and automated packaging equipment has automation but as far as the meat, for the processing of meat, everything’s pretty much done by hand,” Ryan said.

Joyce Farms also offers both beef (since the early 2000s) and pork products (beginning in 2018) from contracted farms in Georgia (beef) and North Carolina (pork). The beef is 100% grass fed and finished, and both are raised without antibiotics. The company processes about 42 head of cattle every week and 15 to 20 hogs.

“We own those animals and are directing what cuts come in,” Ryan said. “How much ground beef, how much is staying in trim, how the animals are broken down at a primal level. So, it’s not like we’re just picking and choosing what cuts to bring in. They’re our animals, so we’re going to move the whole animal.”

Depending on the situation, customers and demand, Joyce Farms sometimes will sell the animals as primals and other times it will further process them for sale.

Joyce Farms products are all natural, meaning no antibiotics or growth hormones, and all animals are raised on farms practicing regenerative agriculture. (Source: Joyce Farms)

Why, what, how

Joyce Farms’ customer base consists of predominantly chefs and buyers who go through a distributor to purchase the company’s meat and poultry products. While chefs and restaurateurs make up 90% of the business, the company also sees about 5% from online sales with another 5% coming from specialty retailers.

The chef and foodservice customers grew organically over the years. Sometimes the company targeted an area and sold a distributor in that area. Often chefs would request that their existing distributor start offering Joyce Farms products.

“It just depends on the area and the relationships that we have and what chefs are in that area,” Ryan said.

The draw to Joyce Farms comes from the many attributes, predominantly hand-cut products and its farming practices and heritage breeds. Every product they sell, beef, pork and poultry, the animals are grown with no antibiotics, no growth stimulants or hormones, and no artificial flavors, and the company farm and all outside suppliers practice regenerative farming. Joyce Farms was practicing regenerative farming before it was a catchphrase used in the industry today.

“When I started in 2015, there were regenerative practices happening, but there wasn’t a term that was used in the market,” said Beth Hill, marketing manager at Joyce Farms. “I remember Ron [Joyce], Ryan and Stuart’s dad, came back from some event and was like ‘We have a name. It’s called regenerative and that’s what we can use to explain these practices.’”

By the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the company grew and got into fast-food distribution, but ultimately sold that part of the business and focused on the natural side and supplying high-end chefs. The business originally came only from chefs looking for something better than what was available in the US market at the time. Ron Joyce realized there was not a wide variety of chicken in the United States.

“He took a trip to France early in the 2000s which led him into the Heritage line,” Stuart said. “Going through the meat markets over there, there are four or five, six different types of chicken or ducks and different types of meat, fish and obviously different produce, but here in the United States, we really had one chicken and that was a commercial, fast-growing, white feather chicken, other than little backyard birds.”

With the Naked Chicken line, started in 1995 and firmly established, 1998 saw the company expand its all-natural offerings to include all-natural turkey and Naked Duck. In 2001, the company established farms to start producing its Heritage line.

It began producing a signature Poulet Rouge Fermier chicken in 2005, and later expanded poultry production to include Pintade Fermiere (French Guinea) and White Pheasant in 2006. In 2011, Joyce Farms added grass-fed and finished beef to the Naked line, and in 2017 that Naked Beef was renamed Heritage Aberdeen Angus Beef due to its descendance from the original Aberdeen Angus of Scotland, bred to consume and thrive on an all-grass diet rather than grain finishing, like modern Angus. In 2018, the company added pork to the Heritage line with the Gloucestershire Old Spot breed of pigs.

Every animal processed by Joyce Farms is raised according to the standards established by the Global Animal Partnership.

Everything at Joyce Farms' processing facility is hand cut to provide consistent, high quality. (Source: Joyce Farms)

Safety First

Along with quality animals and regenerative agricultural practices, Joyce Farms takes pride in putting food safety at the top of its priority list. It has multiple HAACP plans in place throughout its processes and has continually received high grades on third-party Good Manufacturing Practices audits, and recently gained BRC (British Retail Consortium) certification, the international standard for food safety, quality and traceability.

Like many food manufacturing companies, Joyce Farms has struggled with recruiting and retaining labor.

“If we hire 100 people and we retain 25 of them, we will say we’re lucky,” Ryan said.

As a family-owned business, the company often relies on referrals from current employees and keeping employees safe matters as much as any other segment of the business. Meetings with management and staff from different areas of production and weekly safety talks reinforce the company’s pursuit of worker safety.

“Although some positions might be repetitive, we often change the employees’ daily tasks, so it’s not repetitive, so they’re not doing the same thing every day,” Ryan said. “The days are different, areas of production that they’re working in, different cuts and different pieces of equipment and so forth.”

While the company plans to add products periodically and scale slowly and organically, the Joyce brothers said they will continue to practice regenerative agriculture and offer natural, no antibiotics, nothing artificial products and breed and raise animals that fit into the company’s Heritage line.