Red Table Meat Co.

This is Greater MSP Business with Cindy Brucato. The Red Table Meat Company in Minneapolis takes full advantage of our region's agricultural strength with its pork processing business that serves customers from around the nation. Red Table buys whole pigs from local, small, sustainable farms and produces pancetta, salami, hams, and other pork products that take the blue ribbon in food competitions. This business took skill, knowledge, and patience to achieve an artisanal product that meets American health guidelines. From farm to table, the man who brought this all together is Mike Phillips, the founder, the president, the chief salami-er of the Red Table Meat Company. Thanks for having us here today. Why did you decide to start a gourmet pork processing business? I decided to start this business because I would travel around the world and see little places in Italy, Spain, France, wherever that had their specialty. So maybe it was cured this or this amazing cheese or this fantastic wine and they were super prideful about it. And they thought that, I mean so prideful that they might fight somebody in the next town over who's was better. And I saw that missing from our food system and I thought, well, we have these fantastic pigs in Minnesota and in fact those pigs were going to other parts in the U. S. to for people to do the same thing make salami out of and I thought, why don't we do it here? And why don't we do it on a world-class level and say that this is us, this is what Minnesota does and have that pride here. And you already had a background in the industry? Yeah, so I was a chef for 20-25 years and did plenty of curing meat there but I also had garnered lots of relationships with local farmers. Some of the same farms that we use now are farms that I use when I was a chef and I saw how important creating that local food system was and how important it was to me. So this is just really a continuation of that in a lot of ways. You mentioned on the website respect for the pig, respect for this cycle. What does that mean? Well, it means that we buy from five farms and those farmers spend a lot of time raising really good animals and we pay a premi And so for me to take that thing and turn it into something that doesn't really matter, a commodity product wouldn't be respectful. It's a life. Those pigs lose their life. They get slaughtered. It's respectful at the end of the day for the farmer who's put in so much hard work and for everybody along the path to make the best product that we can make. Highest quality. What makes your cured pork products different? Well, usually I just say time and salt. But really it starts on the farm. The pigs are raised outside. For us the pigs are finished on barley which creates a really hard saturated fat which is crucial to a salami process. And then the methods that we learn for breaking a pig from Francois Vecchio, my mentor, a 78-year-old Swiss butcher to pull the pig apart muscle by muscle and then recreate these products from doing that. It's a different process for sure. So then what is going to be next for the Red Table Meat Company? What's next? Well, I mean we are really working hard to be part of Twin Cities' food scene as far as food identity. We really want to say that we are of Minnesota. We are of Minneapolis. We want people to think of us as well this is Minneapolis. If you go to Minneapolis you got to have this. If you are in California and you're thinking of Minneapolis this is what you want. And at the same time we always knew that we would need to be a national brand. So we are focusing lots of energy on making a lot of friends across the U. S. and exploring all those markets for sure. And where are your markets? I mean how do you sell it? Retail, wholesale? Both really. It's a large amount of restaurants especially locally but for sure small specialty shops, grocery stores, delis and that's U. S. wide right now. So we are in New York City and a n We're in San Francisco. We're in Portland, Seattle, Southern California, Dallas, Colorado, Utah, Chicago. Before we close out what is your favorite product? I've been asked that before and my reply always is that'so that's a hard one. But you have said that you Guanciale is fantastic. All right guanciale a recommendation from Mike Phillips of the Red Table Meat Company. For Greater MSP Business I'm Cindy Bercato.