Eco-Conscious Meat Producers Admit to Mislabelling Products
Indie meat producer Belcampo has developed a devoted following of customers willing to pay top dollar for its organic, sustainably raised, grass-fed meat. According to one former employee, people are not getting what they pay for.
Belcampo founder Anya Fernald has said that the company has launched an investigation into the allegations.by Brent Hofacker/ Shutterstock
Started in 2012, Belcampo has become a mini-empire of meat. From the first farm in Northern California, the company has grown to include a nearly 20,000-acre ranch, an online store and half a dozen butcher shops and restaurants. They serve items such as the Superman Salad with grass-fed beef or the Chicken Cobb with pasture-raised chicken and farm eggs.
Belcampo’s website touts that it proudly offers “meat you can trace” with “transparency, start to finish.”
According to one former employee, that’s just not true.
The former employee, Evan Reiner, posted a series of stories to his Instagram account on Sunday, showing the stock room of a Belcampo restaurant and butcher shop. In the videos, he points to cuts of beef and chicken, which he claims are neither grass-fed nor organic and are sourced from as far away as Tasmania.
“I apologize to all the customers that I lied to for the past two and half years in order to keep my job,” Reiner says in one video. “I had to hold onto it for health insurance reasons.
“(Belcampo) do not care about your health, they care about your money. Thought this video would open some eyes and hopefully turn some people away from the scum that Belcampo is,” the video continues.
Belcampo is known for its prime cuts, which come with a hefty price tag. A pound of its filet can run $47.99, and hangar steak can set you back $28.99 per pound. With those costs, allegations that the company was sourcing its meat from outside companies hit social media hard, with many sharing the videos.
In response, Belcampo founder Anya Fernald said in an email that the company has launched an investigation into the allegations, which came from a former employee at its Santa Monica location, whom the company terminated last week.
Fernald emphasized that all locations are held to the same standards for their sourcing, but that individual shops have autonomy when there are supply shortages on certain items. “The preliminary results of our investigation show that unfortunately protocols both for sourcing and communicating product origin to customers were not being followed in our Santa Monica location. These errors made up a small percentage of total product,” Fernald wrote.
Although Fernald did not specify the procedures that stores have to follow or how these products did not meet its standards, she did say that the Santa Monica location has switched to products exclusively from Belcampo and its partner farms, and that the company is “implementing careful retraining and education around our protocols and accountability for our employees and leadership to ensure this does not happen again.”
When reached, Reiner declined to comment.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Emily Baron Cadloff, Modern Farmer
May 25, 2021
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.
Really disappointing— and we can be certain this is not a one time nor one location issue. The lies are rampant in the meat industry, and I was thrilled that a woman-owned meat company was following the holistic path in meat production. They got caught and will no doubt communicate thru a pr company to cover more lies. BUMMER
What a bunch of BS. Ordering is all processed through corporate, there’s nothing ordered for individual stores that they didn’t approve. Fact is like a lot of small businesses the eventually stopped caring about mission and only cared about more profit. They were making good money without cheating but at some point Anya decided that wasn’t enough. This will only stop it for a few months. They’ll work out a way for all orders to come packaged without labels going forward. Hopefully employees at other locations have videos they’ll come forward with. Or maybe Anya will never fire anyone again… Read more »