Showing Up When It Matters: How McPhee’s Butchery Turned a Tough Season Into Community Support When pressure hits a community, you quickly learn who’s willing to roll up their sleeves. With inflation soaring to all-time highs and SNAP benefits shrinking just as families brace for the holidays, many small processors and producers are feeling the […]
November 2025 Newsletter Feature: Read More »
A Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network webinar. Date: October 23, 2025Duration: 90 Minutes You already track production, labor, and yields—but are you tracking the right numbers? In this free webinar, NMPAN and Good Roots dive into their new, real case study about three different small meat processors who used simple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to identify
Processing Matters: Navigating Inspection Pathways for Direct-to-Consumer Beef Sales in Oregon By Kylie Burriss, NMPAN Outreach Specialist and Meat Scientist and Instructor at Oregon State University Today’s consumers are more interested in how and where their beef is produced than ever before. Retail meat counters have become flooded with marketing designed to communicate all the
June 2025 Newsletter Feature: Read More »
This 38 page case study paper provides a deep dive into how small to mid scale meat processors successfully track and utilize Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, to understand, sustain, and grow their business. This case study focuses on actual meat processors, and the KPI they use on a daily basis to make informed decisions
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Meat Processors Read More »
Rethinking How We Train in Meat Processing, Part II: Some Ready-to-Use Training Tools for Meat Processors By David Zarling, NMPAN Program Manager In our April feature, we explored why traditional “information dump” training often falls short in food manufacturing: without clear goals or hands-on practice, learners struggle to connect new knowledge to their day-to-day tasks.
May 2025 Newsletter Feature: Read More »
Rethinking How We Train in Meat Processing By David Zarling, NMPAN Program Manager A wise plant manager once posed to me the following exchange between she and the owner of the plant she managed: Plant Owner: “What if we spend all of this money to train these people and they take their skills elsewhere?” Plant
April 2025 Newsletter Feature: Read More »
Freezing Grant Funds Puts a Chill on Rural America and Our Meat Supply By Rebecca Thistlethwaite, NMPAN Director *The views expressed in this article are those of Rebecca Thistlethwaite’s and not those of Oregon State University where NMPAN is housed. Feel free to reach out to Rebecca if you have a different opinion or if
If you are a meat producer or processor and thinking about making a foray into wholesaling meat, this new guide is for you! Read the one page Executive Summary here. Download the newly published Wholesale Meat Guide 2024 here! This 32 page guide covers the following topics:
Wholesale Meat Guide: Build & Grow Sales in Your Branded Meat Business Read More »
By David Zarling, NMPAN’s Program Manager Contact: zarlingd@oregonstate.edu Continued from the newsletter: The Backbone of Operational Excellence Imagine this: It’s a regular day at the plant. The machinery is humming, the crew is banging through beef sides ahead of schedule, and the cutting, packing and grind lines are running at capacity. Suddenly, the rollstock (thermoformer)
September Newsletter Feature: – The Immune System of a Meat Processing Plant Read More »
By Rebecca Thistlethwaite, Director of the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network at Oregon State University, and Timothy Delbridge, PhD., Agricultural Economist in the Dept. of Applied Economics at Oregon State University Contact: thistler@oregonstate.edu, timothy.delbridge@oregonstate.edu Continued from the newsletter: Obviously, there are a lot of factors at play, which this short article can’t get into. However,