bcla
On our rugged Eastern foothills.....
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2012
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- 25,760
I've heard of them before but never bought from them. It's a company called Belcampo Meat Company, and they previously claimed that all their meats come from their own ranch in Northern California or from their partners operating on the same principles. They had a shop in NYC but that closed. Plus a few restaurants. And they kept on claiming - at least until a butcher at their Santa Monica location spoke out that they were selling meats from ordinary sources and just claiming they were their own grass-fed beef and their chickens at twice the price that one would typically find them.
But they're charging $50/lb for filet?
But they're charging $50/lb for filet?
Evan Reiner says that’s not true. In a series of story posts on Instagram this week, Reiner said Belcampo is “lying to your face” and selling meat it didn’t raise, repackaging and pricing it as if it were the company’s own. Reiner claimed Belcampo has been misrepresenting beef that is not grass-fed, organic or local as well as poultry from third-party suppliers.
“I apologize to all the customers that I lied to for the past 2 1/2 years in order to keep my job,” Reiner wrote, followed by images from the Santa Monica store of beef in shrink wrap printed with the names of other processors, including the mass-production wholesaler National Beef Packing Company, along with Country Day turkey breast from Minnesota and chickens from Pasturebird and Mary’s (both of which are California farms that say their birds are free-range, but sell at other stores for half the price of a Belcampo chicken).
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Rocker Brothers, a family-owned wholesaler in Los Angeles, admits that they sell meat to Belcampo in a volume that has increased throughout the pandemic. “They’re a customer of ours, we’ve fulfilled their orders based on their specifications or needs, and what they did with the product afterward we have no control or say over,” Ryan Grable of Rocker Brothers tells InsideHook.
Some of the products that Rocker and its wholesale competitors supply are largely on par with Belcampo’s cuts of meat, including grass-fed beef and organic, free-range poultry, though Reiner says much of the beef that ended up in the cases was “restaurant choice stuff, corn-fed” — a lower grade than Belcampo’s bespoke grass-fed offerings.
In a response posted on their website, Belcampo acknowledged “serious issues with the integrity of claims on some products and how we communicated them to our customers” in Santa Monica. The company acknowledged ordering from wholesale suppliers when it runs out of specific cuts from its own farms or partners, which it claims are “the primary source” for the meat it sells. “The same high standards used for our own production should be adhered to when sourcing third-party products,” Belcampo wrote.
