OK....it is official....Taylor Country Farms is Back!

After several years of helping a friend get some online marketing going for his jerky line.....the unthinkable happened........the Jack Link monopoly swooped in once again, and bought him up!
Initially, I was thinking I would just walk away.....but the new problem I had was I had many tens of thousands of customers depending on us for jerky, and our "World Famous customer service".
I called Link, he assured me they wouldn't be killing this line....(and I was supposed to believe this guy?) A year or so goes by, they make everybody a "vice president" (fancy word for the same guy that still knows nothing about the jerky business)....a small improvement on the packaging....and aside from having to "get along" with the "know nothing VP"....it was working.
Then.....the USDA shuts down all import from Brazil to US.....(this product had always been produced in Brazil)....The shutdown was widely publicized but still the "VP" was unwilling to admit any known problem, just "busy" (deer in the headlights syndrome)....the inventories started to dwindle, to finally completely out of stock on all items.
The Links staff continued to be uninformative as to why the outage. This would be approximately April 2010.
By May, it became apparent, this line may well be dying a slow death.....it was then that I decided it was time to bring back the Taylor Farms jerky and snack sticks.
Truthfully, Taylor Farms has been gone sine that day in 1999 when I walked out of my old meat plant.....You see, when we sold to King B, they did their best to change the product, labeling, marketing, etc.....then when the monopoly bought King B, the monopoly killed the Taylor line completely, including all existing trademarks, etc. So....now over a decade since we sold, all non competes have long run their course, I guess you could say, we are back at day 1, just as if it was 1979 all over again..... Same as before NO OFFSHORE garbage jerky, this is line is 100% made right in Oregon, USA.
One small difference......there have been tens of thousands of loyal Taylor customers out there just waiting for this day.....and as you may have guessed by now, they are finding us!
Yes, it is true, Taylor Country Farms IS back, and the call for our products is as big as it was "back in the day".......
Stay tuned, things are about to get very interesting.....
Dave

Taylor Country Farms.......

Hi, my name is Dave Taylor. I have been in the meat business for 40yrs, and am well known for quality jerky and snack meat products. I started a company called Taylor Country Farms, LTD. in 1979. In the beginning TCF was a small company with only a handful of employees. We quickly grew to national distribution, and over 100 employees. The plan was simple.....we tried something new......we made quality products and sold them at a fair price! Back in the day, the competition saw us coming, and for the most part, blew us off. After all, when you are a public company with a very deep product development staff, all food science experts with degrees........why would they worry about this little startup company out in Oregon? All the degrees in the world could not match with the hands on knowledge, and creativeness that TCF kept putting out.

Starting with the product line, all the way to the methods of distribution....we really set those college kids back on their heels.....Before they knew it, we had become known as "The product standard that consumers had come to expect" (Frito Lay, 1988, published in a Frito Lay newsletter talking about their new product that was "close" to the Taylor Farms product) (in their opinion).
The competition called me a loose cannon....a red neck, a little guy that couldn't possibly go anywhere......little did they know! By the time 1999 rolled around, we were still growing nationally, and had added some export as well. Still, even with the financial growing pains and product costs on the rise, we maintained our quality, as well as pricing.

It was about that time that we started seeing our competition sniffing us out for possible acquisition (they figured it out). We heard from many, all wanted a "sit down and plant tour" (interpretation: they wanted to come out and learn all our trade secrets, go home and make it themselves.........). They came in droves.....

• GoodMark Foods (Slim Jims)
• Jack Link Snacks
• Fletchers Fine Foods

And the list goes on.......... Nobody was serious, but rather wanted to learn as much as they could about our products, and processes. Most brought their product development COO with them, and all left the visit with no clue as to how we did what we did..........

It was late 1999 when we got another request to buy us out from a smaller company out of Idaho, called King B Snacks. Like the others, we forwarded them a non disclosure agreement, and a day later they were on property. The difference here was, they actually made us an offer we couldn't refuse 3 days later! From there, things moved quickly, and before I knew it, 30 days later, I no longer owned a meat company!

At first it felt real good.....pile of cash in the bank, no more headaches, my product line will go on, and expand.........but then I see them start to change things, product and marketing wise, all in the first few months. Now, you have to ask yourself, why bother buying a company for (their words) our:

• Product line
• Marketing exposure
• Distribution
  

Only to change things, and in effect make the TCF products more like the King B products? OK, so I figured, not my problem.....and moved on.A couple years later, I hear some news that Jack Link had bought out King B (and Taylor).

Jack was an old friend of mine, and he had always been excited about our line. Wow....TCF is now part of the largest meat snacks company in the US! This was a very proud moment for me. I called Jack, and congratulated him. He finally had the best beef jerky in the country....with his size and resources, this was a good thing! A few short months later, I hear the news......Links had killed the Taylor line........Completely! I couldn't believe what I was hearing....my old friend had bought King B and Taylor only to get Taylor out of the marketplace! He then shutdown both the Hubbard plant (old TCF plant) and all but shutdown the Idaho plant (old King B plant).

So, here I am out of the meat business, no more meat plant, and distributors calling me wondering what they are going to do? Well, by this time, I have gotten pretty used to Tuna Fishing off the Oregon coast, have several new grand babies to play with....I really don't want to get back in the manufacturing business. So, I called a few old buddies of mine, took a look at what products they were making, and have started to sell products for a few of them. I call it JerkyNet and can be found at http://www.taylorcountryfarms.com/. We started with a great jerky line produced by one of my buddies in the business. A few years later, he sold out, product started changing. While still a GREAT jerky, it still is NOT the Taylor product. So, after 10 years, I have decided enough is enough..........Standby to start seeing some of that famous Taylor product on our website very soon.

So, I guess you could say........"He's back..............."

Dave............