Walden Local Meat
Photo by Michael Piazza / Illustration by Jessica Fimbel Willis
The workday at Walden Local Meat begins at 1:30am. That’s when the pre-load crew arrives at the company’s fulfillment center in Billerica. They take the day’s delivery bags, packed the day before, from the warehouse freezers, give them a final check and add items like eggs and dry goods as well as dry ice to keep the meat packages frozen. Delivery vans are then loaded up and drivers start to arrive at 4am. The first deliveries are scheduled for between 5 and 6am, the surest way to get a head start on Boston traffic.
Such is the routine, five days a week, accounting for 60 to 120 deliveries a day per truck. What’s inside each insulated canvas bag depends on the share plan the customer (referred to as a member) has chosen. On average, each bag contains 10 pounds of local, sustainable meats.
Walden Local Meat, founded in late 2013, provides a unique service. Founder and CEO Charley Cummings explains that Walden is both a distinct brand of meat and a distribution service comparable to the good ol’ milkman. In many ways, the company operates similarly to a community-supported agriculture (CSA) harvest subscription program—in which members receive a share or allotment of products, which can be produce, meat or fish, on a regular basis—but with a few important differences. Walden doesn’t own a farm but works with about 75 partner farmers in New England and New York. (Often, though, the company owns beef cattle and chickens that are kept at some of these farms.) Members pay for and receive a monthly share of meats, but unlike a typical CSA there is no upfront financial commitment. And unlike most CSAs, where members have to pick up their share at a set location, day and time, Walden delivers.
In 2019, Walden purchased approximately 1.75 million pounds of local, sustainably raised meat. The animals are raised without hormones or antibiotics. Beef is 100% grass-fed and finished; pigs, lamb and chickens are pasture-raised. No synthetic fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides are used on the farms and animal feed is local and non-GMO. These are exacting standards, for which the farmers incur higher costs. In return, Walden pays significantly more than commodity prices. About $2.15 million more, says Cummings. Helping farmers “take home a living wage” is one of Walden’s many business objectives.
The company’s distribution model is direct-to-home. “We now service about 18,000 members,” says Cummings. Sales increased by 50% in 2019 alone, he says, adding “We’ve grown to be the largest share program in the country.” Walden’s market stretches throughout eastern Massachusetts, north into southeastern New Hampshire and to Portland, Maine, down into Hartford and the southwestern part of Connecticut, southeast to Cape Cod, throughout New York City and parts of Long Island, and west into Central New Jersey. In addition to the Billerica fulfillment center, the company operates a transportation hub in Stamford, Connecticut.
When members join the program they select from four share plans, choosing the meats they want (from beef, pork, chicken and lamb), the monthly share size (total pounds) and the number of cut portions (servings needed). “A Complete share is like buying a share of an animal,” says Philip Giampietro, president and COO. This share includes ground meat, sausage and/or bacon and a mix of cuts, such as roasts, steaks, chops, ribs and whole chickens. A Basics share typically contains ground meat, sausages, chickens or roasts. The Just Grind category is ground meat only. With a Custom share, there’s more choice. Share prices start at $39 per month for five pounds of ground meat and go up to $84 for a six- to seven-pound Custom share; prices increase as the share size increases.
“We need to balance the shares because we’re buying whole animals,” says Giampietro. That means apportioning, among thousands of members, the different animal proteins, taking into account member preferences, overall demand and company inventory. Walden uses a sophisticated algorithm to determine the best mix of meats for each share. The items are collected in bins, labels printed for every package (with the name and location of the farmer) and the order is packed into the delivery bags. Packers can override the system if there are special member instructions. Recipes are tucked into every bag.
With some share plans there’s an element of surprise in the kinds or cuts of meats in a specific delivery, says Giampietro. “We work really hard to make sure members have a good experience.”
Add-ons include bacon, eggs, butter made from milk from grass-fed cows and seasonal and holiday specials. Local fish, traceable back to a specific fisherman and location, is also on the menu. “If we’re trying to create a sustainable system of agriculture in this region, it makes sense to include seafood,” says Cummings.
The primary demographic Walden serves is young families with children. These members want to feed their families responsibly and healthfully, with good-quality meats, says Cummings. The second-largest customer segment is baby boomer parents, who tend to be influenced by their millennial children to purchase more sustainably raised foods.
Walden also sells to a handful of restaurants, colleges and small specialty grocery stores. About two years ago, it opened a retail shop in Boston’s South End. “The shop is a microcosm of what we do,” says Cummings. “We take in whole animals and break them down.” The store also offers classes on butchering and sausage making.
It was a circuitous path that led Cummings, 36, to start Walden Local Meat six years ago. After an early stint in management consulting, work in the clean energy field and time spent in California’s Central Valley where he witnessed the detrimental effects of industrial meat production, Cummings and his wife, Kristen, moved back to Massachusetts in 2013. (Cummings grew up in Brewster.) “I met agricultural folks in the Northeast doing everything right regarding animal welfare and sustainability from an environmental perspective,” he says, but specific to meat, “there was no viable path to get these products to market.”
In a nutshell: “Farmers don’t sell steaks, they raise and sell cows,” says Cummings. “The production side is already complicated,” he says, with challenges including animal care, the vagaries of weather, a short growing season, soil fertility and commodity prices. “No way they could scale and grow a profitable business through farmers markets alone.”
Instead, the farmers benefit from the ease and stability of selling, in many cases, the majority of their animals to Walden. In this way, the company functions like a cooperative. (“But it’s not an exclusive relationship, which is beneficial to the farmer,” says Cummings.) With most, Walden has a monthly purchase commitment, typically for six to 12 months out.
One of Walden’s partner farmers is Jim Westbrook, owner of CherryRail Farm in Brattleboro, Vermont, who raises Tamworth pigs. The pigs are pasture raised, free to roam seven acres. Westbrook feeds them whey and cheese from a local cheesemaker, spent grain (barley) from a local brewery, other grains and vegetables. He meets all of Walden’s requirements: The pigs live outdoors and are not given hormones or antibiotics or fed any animal byproducts. “They’re about as naturally raised as they can be without being organic,” he says.
Initially, Westbrook sold Walden about 10 pigs per month; now he’s hoping to reach a total of 450 pigs in 2020. Selling a whole pig to Walden versus parts to multiple outlets is much easier for Westbrook. “I’m a one-person operation,” he says. “I need a constant demand for whole pigs.” Christine Templeton credits Walden with saving her farm. She and her husband, Brian, own Templeton Family Organics in Goffstown, New Hampshire, and raise over 6,000 chickens per year. “They’re moved onto fresh pasture every day,” says Templeton, via a system of 10 mobile pens shuttled around by a tractor. “Less than 1% of all chickens are pasture-raised because it’s manually intensive and expensive,” she says. “This has become our niche as we’re able to do a high-quality product.”
The Templetons currently sell about 90% of their chickens to Walden. Before this arrangement, they not only had to raise the birds, but drive them to processing plants, pay processing fees, pick up the meat and sell different parts to different markets and cooperatives. They were losing money on every sale. “Walden saved our farm,” says Christine Templeton. “Walden buys the whole bird and they’re not wasting any of it. And we’re paid right away for our product. It’s a win-win for both the farm and Walden.”
Overall, meat consumption in the United States has ticked up slightly over the last five years, with beef mostly flat (and while demand for grass-fed beef is growing, it’s still a tiny percentage of beef sales), pork numbers fairly constant and chicken consumption rising. Cummings isn’t worried about new competition from plant-based meat substitutes such as Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. “We’re part of a movement of people who want real, whole, unadulterated food,” he says. “A fake burger is one of the most processed foods I can imagine.” Still, he says, from an environmental perspective, “I’d rather people eat that than industrialized meat.”
In late 2018, Walden converted to a Public Benefit Corporation, a for-profit business with a stated public purpose beyond profit making. A forthcoming $1 million bond offering available to members will help fund continued growth. “This gets members truly invested in our company,” says Cummings.
Walden has found that sweet spot as a middleman, lodged firmly between dozens of small farmers raising animals in a humane and sustainable way and thousands of consumers who value (and are willing to pay for) high quality meats, the convenience of personal delivery and supporting local agriculture. These priorities align with all of Cummings’ business and personal objectives. He also prefers meat that tastes good.
This story appeared in the Spring 2020 issue and was written before the outbreak of Covid-19 in the US. Walden Local Meat is busier than ever in the weeks since social distancing has become the new normal.
