Three Friends Find Success With Online Butcher Shop Meat N Bone

When friends Gabriel Llaurado, German Vollbracht, and Luis Mata founded premium online butcher shop Meat N’ Bone in 2018, they could not have foreseen the vast changes that would take place in the restaurant and retail food industries two years later. However, the three had utilized their experience in business to set Meat N’ Bone up so that the company was prepared to scale when Covid-19 closed down much of the United States and started a home cooking frenzy across the country.

Meat N’ Bone features more than 300 premium-quality cuts of meat, poultry, and seafood. While the focus is on beef, offerings also include Iberico pork, chicken, lamb, sausage, game, salmon, tuna, and branzino plus a focused selection of beer, wine, sake, and alcohol-infused ice cream. All products are sourced from high quality programs across the United States and around the world. Customers across the US can order and receive their products in under 48 hours, and south Florida residents can have food to their door in just two hours. The online delivery site and three Florida retail locations are said to be the first butcher shops in the world that accept crypto currency. 

The concept of Meat N’ Bone began in 2016, and the online shop went into operation in March 2018. The first of three retail stores opened in Miami in March 2019. Two other locations followed: Coral Springs in November, 2019 and Pinecrest this past January. The trio also opened a casual steakhouse, The Wagyu Bar, exclusively featuring Meat N’ Bone products, in October 2020, while much of the country remained closed due to the pandemic. 

Meat N’ Bone hit the one million dollar in sales mark within 16 months of its founding, and according to the partners it has “grown exponentially since then.” The company claims incremental growth in all its sales channels—on-site retail, online retail, and restaurant—and it expects to fulfill more than 50,000 orders this year. 

We spoke with the three partners about the origins of Meat N’ Bone and the secret to its success.

World Wine Guys: What was your career path to starting Meat N’ Bone?

Gabriel Llaurado, Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer:I have always loved building things and making a difference. My biggest dream has been creating something big. 

My background is computer science and while I held several consulting engineering jobs, my extroverted personality led me into a commercial and business development career at media companies. Before going into Meat N’ Bone, I led CNN’s efforts for the US Hispanic division in the Northeast and then ran an international media agency. After servicing many brands, researching and understanding customer behaviors, Meat N’ Bone’s concept was the place where I saw my dream to make a difference and build something big.

German Vollbracht, Co-Founder & Chief Operation Officer: In my studies, I majored in business administration and culinary arts, along with two minor degrees in the fields of sales and marketing and business finance. My love for the service industry took me on a career path of hotels, restaurant and catering business development, management, and accounting, all while running my own businesses. Years ago, my path of life gave me the chance to live for a couple of years among farmers in the state of Michigan. I developed many relationships and friendships during this time that gave me a different approach, access to, and an understanding of these businesses and the underappreciated quality that this industry had in its hands. I brought in this collaboration of interests, education, and experiences along with my love for BBQ and grilling, to help make Meat N’ Bone happen.

Luis Mata, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer: From when I was very young, I loved the way numbers made sense of things that are often complex. This led me to a career in finance which later allowed me to work in strategy, business development and mergers and acquisitions for companies such as UPS, Ryder, Channel and Laureate Education. I have never been afraid of crossing industries and have tried and mostly failed at attempting to do the startup thing in the past. But the school of life gave me the motivation to keep on trying. My love of good food and friends sparked the idea for Meat N’ Bone. I knew the two perfect people to help me bring it from an idea to a reality: German and Gabriel.

WWG: How did you go about sourcing your beef and other meat and seafood?

Meat N’ Bone: At the beginning, it took time, research and travel to understand the different aspects of the industry. We still have many books we read while doing our research in our facilities. The USDA website was the most important bookmark in our computer.

The internet was a great tool and German’s initial farm contacts in the Midwest, where he had spent some time living during his youth, were extremely helpful. Luis even traveled to Europe and South America to see how they did things differently.

Learning how most supermarkets and butchers get their beef in the US and how the industry has changed in the past 30 years helped us understand why quality meats are hard to find but also helped us understand how to do it. 

Since day one, our commitment to our clients is to do the homework and to properly source and bring consistency to our offering. We are an e-commerce business, so we have to make sure we are able to establish processes and standards to our offering so that our customers can enjoy their purchases.

We developed our internal process that includes research and source and quality control. It starts from deeply researching the background of the protein from questions like; what makes it special? How has it been raised from the past 15 to 25 years? Have there been any environmental effects that would make a difference when deciding our sourcing? Then we have to find the way to add it to our supply chain and standardizing how the cut(s) will be done according to proper weights.

WWG: Did Covid-19 have an effect on your business?

MNB: Not two years ago our company had a staff of three (us), mostly part-time employees working in the back of a restaurant facility. We bootstrapped the business with less than $5,000 in cash and A LOT of sweat. 

However, we had a strong business plan from day one, we always knew we had to scale so we prepared for it since day one. That meant building everything thinking of a much larger operation, documenting processes and training. It wasn’t easy considering we also did everything else. We coded our own website, typed our own copy—almost every word on the website was typed by Luis—and even fulfilled the orders.

Two and a half years later with more than 25 employees operating out of our own facility, our processes are mostly the same. It has not been easy, but we would say we planned it right.

Our business was growing fast before COVID-19 hit, but once COVID hit the growth became almost unsustainable due to the high demand. However, we adapted quickly. Since we were already dealing with a high-quality food product, we had a lot of safety protocols in place. So, the challenge came mostly around dealing with our customers, having our retail staff wear masks and adopt COVID-19 protocols. We run a tight ship and fortunately we did not have any issues during the pandemic.

Access to our offering and the convenience attached to it reassured our business proposition: To leverage technology, convenience, and consistency in a unique, premium product to our customers. As a result of the pandemic, new clients remain engaged and our retention rate improved.

In April 2020, organic online traffic to our store went up 400%. Our customer retention rate between Q4 2019 and Q1 2020 averaged 54 %. From May 2020 to Feb 2021 it  has been over 63 %.

WWG: Can you explain what G1 certified beef is, and how it compares to other high-quality beef?

MNB: G1 means we are only working with AAA cattle that are less than 30 months old by the time they are processed, with a ribeye area that is between 10 and 16 square inches. Our hot carcass weight has to be below 1050 pounds, [while] the meat industry usually goes up to1600 pounds or more. In layman’s terms, this is how beef is supposed to be and how beef was prior to the consolidation of the beef industry in the early 1990s, [with] a focus in raising animals with the love they deserve. 

 This love and care lead to beef that grade on the top echelon of USDA Prime and USDA Choice. But it is so much more than that because it also means that our beef is wet aged for 30 days. Most of the beef you will find is aged for about 7-14 days.

WWG: Are there really 16 different types of ribeye? What are some of them, and what makes them distinct?

MNB: Let’s start from the beginning: Beef is qualified by something called the Beef Marbling Score. Steers are graded based on the amount and distribution of marbling in the ribeye muscle at the cut surface after the carcass has been ribbed between the 12th and 13th ribs.

The variety of these ribeyes come from combinations of the way we cut it (Boneless or Bone-in, AKA Cowboy or Tomahawk) and with the grade (G1 Choice, G1 Prime, Wagyu-Angus, Wagyu BMS6-7, Wagyu BMS 8-9 and Miyazaki-Gyu Japanese A5). We also have Olive Fed Wagyu and Grass Fed. Finally, we also dry age our ribeyes and infuse them with spirits in special runs. You could also count our Bison Ribeye.

So, in a nutshell, we actually have over 24 different ribeyes right now.