Ted Gunthorp
The farm as seen from his parents’ home. Below, 4-day-old chicks.
Gunthorp Farms
435 N. Road 850E, LaGrange, gunthorpfarms.com
is the ability of our customers to create an ultimate dining experience. Frontera Grill has been our largest customer over the years, and the products we send to them help them to bring people into their restaurants. That’s something a person really has to keep in mind. You’re not just selling an animal that is based on the price per pound. You’re selling a product that is of the utmost quality at all times.
I can barely imagine the kind of risk you took on when you determined to process your own meat. »We knew we wanted to sell to 3-, 4-, 5-star restaurants, and they are extremely
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Farm Indiana // AUGUST 2016
particular about how they want things processed. They want it handled correctly; they want everything as fresh as possible. So it came down to my stubbornness. If you are going to get into selling to white tablecloth restaurants, you either have to have a really good relationship with a processer, or you probably have to own a processing plant. I don’t think there’s another option. I don’t think you can cold call a processer and say, “I want to sell to restaurants and am going to bring you a varied number of beef every week, and I need them cut up the day after, and it’s going to be different every week.” If the processer
was really into that, they would probably be selling to restaurants themselves. When we became part owners of a plant 37 miles from here, I couldn’t manage it. I was either at the farm when I should have been at the processing plant, or at the plant when I should have been selling in Chicago. But I knew I could make it work if we built a plant on the farm. At the time, access to capital was a huge problem. We had to be creative. But we built a processing plant on a shoestring, and we made it work. I get the chance to speak to a lot of classes through Junior Achievement, and I tell people I’m 100 percent convinced