#44 – Chip Perrin (USMC) & David Billings (US Army) – Coastal Plains Meat Company

Our guests this week are Chip Perrin and David Billings, Owner and Executive Board member with Coastal Plains Meat Company based in Eunice, Louisiana. As the largest harvest facility in Louisiana with a growing direct-to-consumer ecommerce platform and customer processing capability, Chip and David are working to solve a processing bottleneck in the state of Louisiana for Louisiana producers. Their joint backgrounds in military service and cattle production provide them a level of leadership and practical experience not typically found in the localized meat processing/packaging sector.

In this episode, the three of us get into:

• Their military backgrounds and serendipitous meeting at a young entrepreneurs’ conference in Houston
• Consumer preferences pushing against the traditional business models of middlemen choosing what they can buy from the grocery story and more towards direct from the farm with specialized preferences like “grass finished” or “all natural”
• The feedback loop from a facility like Coastal Plains to the producer regarding things like yield and quality data, which will help them make better decisions about their genetics and breeding programs
• The educational role Coastal Plains is providing in helping their producers better understand consumer preferences, which will ultimately determine their process.
• The origin of their ecommerce platform from a small pilot program in a targeted market segment to a reliable revenue stream shipping across the state.

Enjoy!