One early Thursday morning in April, Dave Rand and Andrew Lutsey sat in their rented second-floor office in the old Testa Produce warehouse on the northern fringe of Pilsen waiting for a side and a half of beef and a whole hog from a farm in central Indiana. The delivery was late due to ceaseless overnight rains that rendered rush hour on the expressways a continuous logjam from the top of the city to the bottom.
You might look at the number of restaurants around town that tout their use of locally grown foods and assume that this would be an uncomplicated task. But the development of the supply chain for local food hasn’t kept pace with the demand. Lots of chefs in town may want to put a grass-fed rib eye on their menus, but there really aren’t enough to go around, and even when there are, there’s not a well-developed system in place that can transport the food raised by small producers with consistency and efficiency. That’s because most food distribution networks exist to accommodate the big guys—the Syscos, or even big regional companies like Testa, which moved into a state-of-the-art facility a few years ago and began renting out its old space to smaller companies like Local Foods. The big wholesalers operate on a scale too large to be bothered by just a single delivery of a side and a half of pastured beef.
“What we do best is build relationships with these smaller- and midsized farmers,” Lutsey adds. “Testa probably wouldn’t talk to him.”
Since opening Vera, his much smaller Spanish restaurant, Mendez no longer shops at the market. “Because I had 50 people working for me [at Carnivale], I could kinda step away and do that kind of stuff, and work with the farmers. But here [at Vera] we’re janitors, reservationists, plumbers, and sometimes it can be kind of overwhelming.” Mendez still buys from plenty of individual farmers. In high summer it could be as many as a dozen transactions a day. For each of them he has to text or call in individual orders. “There are people I’m always gonna use just because I have relationships,” he says. “I’m gonna always buy lambs from this guy and I’m always gonna buy beef from this guy. But on the other hand, you have a beef guy, you have a lamb guy, you have a chicken guy, you have a greens guy, an arugula dude, a turnip guy, and a tomato dude. It just gets to be crazy after a while.”
Rand, who’s 28 and was born in Saint Louis, got his first real job in Alaska the summer after his junior year of high school, working at a salmon cannery in Bristol Bay, home of the largest salmon run in the world. He operated cranes and boom trucks, unloaded boats, and moved nets around. “I’d keep our old-ass fleet of vehicles running,” he says. “The job was really called ‘fisherman services.’ It’s like everything you can do to support the fishermen and keep them out on the water fishing.” He continued to work there in summers through college, and over five years worked his way up to fleet manager, overseeing the logistics of getting a hundred vessels out on the water and back during the eight-week run when the cannery took in a half-million pounds of fish each day.
Lutsey, 30, grew up in Green Bay, where his grandfather and father built Gold Bond Ice Cream, a novelty manufacturer that at one time owned Popsicle. He worked in real estate and private equity in Chicago for five years before he got restless. Meanwhile his father started a hobby ranch in Door County, raising grass-fed beef and selling it at farmers’ markets. “I was losing a little interest in the direction I was going, and so I decided to jump on board with him. He and my brother had been growing the business and I got into sales and marketing, a finance role. And I was spending a ton of time out there doing farmers’ markets and wholesale deliveries as we were growing from about 40 head to where we are now, which is about 300 head. And we’ve since layered in a hog operation and a poultry operation.”
