OneTenHundred

Eric (00:01)
Hey everybody, welcome to 1-10-100. I am Eric, your host, and with me today is Tina Levy. I met Tina, dang it, see, there we go. That's why we practice. Hey everybody, welcome to 1-10-100. I'm your host Eric, and with me today is Tina Levy. I met Tina a long time ago. We were classmates at UNC Kingdom Flagler, and I know her today as the co-founder, COO, and CFO of First Hand Foods, a Durham-based

woman-owned meat company. Tina, I'm so glad that you're here.

Tina Levy (00:36)
Thank you so much for having me. This is gonna be fun.

Eric (00:38)
Yeah, so I guess describe your business. Like most of the people that I know and most of the people that listen to this are tech people. You are decidedly in the physical goods category. Describe your business at a high level and then I've got some pretty pointed questions for you.

Tina Levy (01:01)
On the most basic level, First Hand Foods sells meat. We are predominantly a wholesaler of beef, pork, lamb, and chicken.

And all of that meat, we're a mission driven business focused on supporting small family farms that are raising animals outdoors on pasture. So all of that meat comes from those kinds of farmers. They're all here in North Carolina or nearby. And our mission and purpose is to create market access for them. So we're helping get those meats into restaurants, specialty retailers and institutions like public schools, university

dining halls, corporate dining halls. We have about 30 farmers in our network. We work with about four different small-scale meat processing plants to do the slaughter and fabrication work for us. So we don't really open packages of meat. We're just a lot of focused on supply chain development, logistics, market development, getting meat from A to B, and making sure folks are happy with the quality of that.

Eric (02:15)
Complicated is what I heard from that. Yeah, go back to the very beginning. It's clear why you started this. It's about access for farmers and preserving that way of life and providing a quality product. What's the first step to finding your first customer in a marketplace business like this?

Tina Levy (02:19)
Lots of moving parts.

For us, our first hire was a big part of that. our first hire was a chef named Drew Brown, who happens to be on our team again. And...

He was coming out of owning a restaurant called Piedmont, which was one of the first restaurants in downtown Durham. He was known, great restaurant, was known for local sourcing, he was known for quality food, and we happened to find out that he was exiting his restaurant around the time that we were trying to get going. And so those early days were all about relationships and a lot about Drew's relationships. And so we just tapped the Durham restaurant community and said, hey, would you be interested

Eric (03:03)
I remember Piedmont.

Tina Levy (03:27)
in this and their feedback and support and belief in what we were doing at that early stage was critical. They sort of gave us proof of concept, helped us, know, Drew did a lot of product development, we hit the ground running with different, a suite of sausages that he developed for us and we actually hit the market with a food truck. That was our way.

Eric (03:52)
Yeah, I remember the food

truck too.

Tina Levy (03:53)
We

got the sausage wagon and it was our way of getting our brand our products and our story out in the world And it really worked and our very first wholesale customer that was sex about general store I remember very vividly Jeff Barney one of the founders and owners there Calling me like as soon as he heard what we were doing probably from the press released from our launch event and saying okay how can I get some of this product and We were not ready for him

remember,

so the sausage wagon was my trial by fire of what it meant to take a business from idea to execution. And we thought, okay, we'll launch the sausage wagon a month later, we'll launch the wholesale business. Well, then I was like, as soon as the sausage wagon launched, I realized, crap, like we have systems to build, we have routines to create.

Eric (04:43)
Yeah, that is a business. That business requires someone

to run it.

Tina Levy (04:48)
Yeah, so I could see what was coming with the launch of the wholesale and so we slowed everything down. It was probably four months later that we actually launched the wholesale side of the business, but Jeff was our very first customer. He was raring to go and I was looking back through our list of early customers and preparing for this conversation and it was toast. It was six plates. was...

Gear Street Garden and a lot of those folks who are still around and still have us on the menu.

Eric (05:19)
Yeah, wow. you started, you had relationships and started building relationships before you really even had access to your suppliers. So you effectively sold the product before you had it.

Tina Levy (05:32)
We actually had it on both ends because Jennifer, my business partner, had spent the last several years directing a nonprofit called NC Choices that was in deep relationship with the farmers and the processors in that world and trying to help them figure out how to connect, how to develop supply chains. And so I was doing the same or similar work in a nonprofit capacity and became convinced, there's a need here for a middle business.

And so that was a huge part of our success too on the supply chain side was she was a known entity, a trusted entity. She had already helped these folks a ton and then that also helped us get some early funding that was non-profit or sort of grant funding so that the farmers knew, hey, we're going to get paid. They have money.

Eric (06:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Tina Levy (06:26)
So that was the other side of the business that allowed us to kind of have relationships on that side of things.

Eric (06:33)
So you had the demand side pretty well, or you had the supply side pretty well circled up going into it. And the thesis was, is there actually a demand side for this? that's where you plugged in and that's where the ship. Yeah. One of the things that I've always been impressed about you and your business is that you're doing it on hard mode. Software is easy.

Tina Levy (06:43)
Is there a demand side and is there a willingness to pay that supports a middle business?

Eric (07:02)
Imperatively like it's got its problems and it's really actually really hard the same with services It's a different but you've got a physical product that's perishable. That's got regulatory Issues around it, you know, you can't sit on it for very long And you've got a really complicated supply chain Like how long did it take for you to stitch all of this together? And how has it changed over the past, you know 15 years that you've been building this business?

Tina Levy (07:33)
We probably spent a year in business planning mode and pulling together funding and figuring out the financial model and the supply chain elements. And then it was interesting getting ready for this conversation. I looked back, yeah, who is customer number one? Who is customer number 10? And how...

many customers did we get our first year versus our second year. And it was so interesting to me. I literally flipped through the invoices for the first year or two of the business to see what that looked like. And for the first few months, it's the same five customers just over and over again. We're just learning how to do this. And then, with customer number 10,

Eric (08:13)
Yeah, wow.

Yeah.

Tina Levy (08:26)
was Bull City Burger and Brewery. And Bull City Burger continues to be our largest and most important restaurant customer. But that was when we really started to prove our value proposition.

like to ourselves and to the restaurant community because Seth knew he, so Seth is one of the owners and founders of Full City Burger and Ruri. He knew he wanted to open a burger restaurant, but only if it was serving local sustainably sourced meats. And he thought he was gonna do that work on his own of the sourcing. And...

Eric (09:03)
Yeah.

Tina Levy (09:05)
Started to try and do that work and quickly realized. crap. That's like a whole other business I have to like know farmers know how older animals are and no processors and negotiate pricing and logistics and scheduling and he was trying to do all that and quickly realized like

need to open a restaurant and we were hearing about each other because we at the time we were working in Bull City Forward in which was like a co-working space an incubator space in downtown and so people kind of knew what we were up to people knew what he was up to and they're like you guys need to talk and boy did we need to talk because he needed exactly what we were building ourselves to do and

In beef, beef animals are so large and such a huge percentage of each beef animal is ground beef or grind cuts to make ground beef. And so if you're going to grow a meat business, you need some anchor.

beef, and so here's our anchor customer and here's his sort of supply chain logistics work and it was just this perfect little partnership and and like the best illustration of our value proposition that you could have in terms of why why should you source from us?

Eric (10:03)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tina Levy (10:23)
And how are we expanding? Because there were restaurants in Durham and around the triangle that were buying direct from farmers. We had no interest in replacing that. But we wanted to expand who considered it a possibility. Because certain folks were just not going to do it. Because one farmer was not going to have enough for them to put something on their menu year round or to keep it as a fresh product. Farmers, they're selling whole animals like we are. They got a free stuff.

Eric (10:23)
Yeah.

Tina Levy (10:52)
stuff

to manage their inventory. They might not have year-round production. yeah, was like, okay, people, this is the perfect illustration of our value proposition and folks are starting to really see where we're adding value and adding market access.

Eric (11:08)
Yeah, yeah.

So you are really close to your customers, as in you are at their farms and you rub their little snouts on their little piggies, right? You know them and know their kids and know their animals, and it's always been that way.

Tina Levy (11:16)
Yes.

Yeah, that's one of

the best parts about this work is all the relationships and how long standing and deep they are.

Eric (11:34)
Yeah,

that's great.

What do you remember feeling during that sort of first few years? Like I know you had a young family and just a lot going on and there's a lot of uncertainty and certainly like incredible complexity and like just making it work at the tiniest scale, let alone scaling it up the way that you have. Like what do you remember feeling?

as the business owner and leader during that time.

Tina Levy (12:11)
Hmm, that's a good question. I just, yeah, it was invigorating. I remember just being like sort of wide open. There was always a problem to solve. There was always some new thing to figure out. And it was exciting because, and also Durham is just such a supportive community of entrepreneurship in general, but particularly at that time.

This farm to fork work was so, there was so much demand for what we were doing and so much excitement about what we were doing. And so you really felt so much support, which made all that problem solving exciting instead of overwhelming, because you knew that it was going to be worth it.

Eric (13:00)
Yeah, yeah, I guess it does help to incubate a meat business in a like exploding dining scene.

Tina Levy (13:05)
Yeah,

mean, our timing could not have been better. There was a long stretch of time when I just felt like the stars were always aligning for us. Like, our timing around where the Durham restaurant community was and where it was going and the Triangle restaurant community in general, it all was really fortuitous in a lot of ways.

Eric (13:15)
Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, yeah. So I guess when did you know it was going to work? Was it the first time the stars are aligned or was it like the 100th time the stars aligned?

Tina Levy (13:40)
It's so funny because yeah, I don't know that I like lift my head up to ask that question too many times in the early days. It was just like go, go, go, hustle, hustle. We launched. We also just think there was so much we didn't know that we didn't know.

And I remember launching and like we didn't even really have a great cold storage solution. We launched the business. We were friendly with Cliff's meat market and he had some coolers and he was like, you guys can store the meat here. We're like, great, we'll do that. And that didn't work very long at all. And so it was just, it was always pivoting and solving, you know, figuring it out and making it work. And there wasn't, yeah, there wasn't a ton of opportunity to look up and think about it.

There were times, like for the first few years, we were demand driven and supply constrained. So there were points when the supply challenges were overwhelming. And I know we made Seth at Bull City so nervous that we weren't gonna have enough beef for him at certain times or that we weren't gonna pull through and meet his needs. And those times.

Eric (14:51)
Yeah, like you can't just have like

a reserve cow. Like that's the thing that's like always blown me away is that, have you, did you guys like build software to manage this? Like how do you know that your network of 50 or however many farmers, how do know what they have coming? And how do you verify that? And how do you ensure it lands in the right places with your, you know, network of restaurants and grocery stores and retailers and everywhere else that you guys.

Tina Levy (15:20)
Yeah, mean

production planning is a big part of, we are business model is what the USDA calls a food hub. And there are food hubs like ours all over the country. We're one of the few that's exclusively focused on meat. So a lot of these conversations were in about produce, but it's the same problem of production planning and scheduling. But for us, we, it's all,

I fantasize about software and I could probably help somebody design some really good software. But a lot of spreadsheets, we do have an inventory management software, but in terms of the production planning, it's a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of conversations. And then also because most of our farmers have been with us from day one and they have sort of their annual cycles. They know when they're calving, they know when those calves are going to be weaned, they know when they're going to be finished. And so there's some

nice sort of repetitive nature to it. But yeah, we're talking to folks about when they're calving. We have a sense of how long it takes to get an animal to finish weight, but these are two year out commitments. So like we are already talking about 2026 commitments.

Eric (16:38)
Jeez,

okay.

Tina Levy (16:40)
And so, like we are, for the first time in a decade, we are losing producers because folks are aging now and figuring out succession plans for their farms. And we're actively seeking new producers right now. And we're going out, we're visiting farms, we're figuring out.

Are their systems what we need? Is there quality where we need it? But we can't make, we won't see any beef from them until 2026 because that's the, that's how long it takes to raise a beef animal. So yeah, it's a lot of trust, a lot of,

Eric (17:15)
Yeah.

Tina Levy (17:22)
know, committing to each other different things way far in advance. And that's why like doing what we said we're going to do is key. We have to pay people what we said on time, never cancel on animals, because the whole thing falls apart as soon as you, these folks are taking big risks and making big commitments to you like for down the road. And if you pull out, they've, they've let go of all their other options. So yeah.

Eric (17:46)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

How have you changed as a person building this business and running it the way that you have with the values that you have?

Tina Levy (18:03)
Yeah, I mean, I think I've really learned the power of business in terms of like to make a difference in the world, like being just this idea of having an intention, going out and making it happen, like that that's something you can do and like how exhilarating that is and like, and

Early on I was blown away by the power of branding. I could not believe that people would read a press release about what we were doing and our intention and our goals for the business and show up and wait in line for an hour for a sausage just based on a story we were telling. I couldn't believe it. So that really blew me away in the early days and

Eric (18:59)
Well, they were really good sausages, as I recall. And they still are really good sausages.

Tina Levy (19:00)
And then as we're...

Yeah, they're still the same sausages and people get attached. But yeah, it's like, and what's been so great too is like, I've been able to learn and lean into different sort of learnings throughout the time. So, you know, we went from branding to operations and supply chain development and all the learning there about...

This all just comes down to people and relationships and how you treat people and how you communicate with people. Like, that is the crux of the whole model, ultimately. And then,

Now as the supply chain stuff has become more sort of foundational and there, we really were able to turn to what being a good employer and what it means to have a business that works and that is data driven and where people want to be a part of the team and can are bringing their ideas to you and bringing the problems to you. And that's been a huge learning for me. And I love sharing.

that stuff with other business owners because it's like it's not it doesn't come natural you need systems and you need rules and routines and figuring out what those are and how to make them work for you is I really like that part of it too.

Eric (20:30)
Sure, What's next for you? mean, you guys are easily in over 100 restaurants and retailers all over North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina. What's the next phase for you?

Tina Levy (20:44)
Right now, this last year has been, the new opportunities for us have been around schools. The federal government has been providing funding for public schools to do local sourcing. A lot of this focus on

They've also been providing support for food banks to do local sourcing. And a lot of that energy and ideas came out of the pandemic of realizing the insecurity of dominant supply chains for meat and wanting to make investments in these more localized, regionalized supply chains so that if the shit hits the fan again, there's food going to food banks and there's food going to schools.

And so we've been leaning into those relationships and those are great for us. And we hope to continue to. And figuring out how to hold on to institutional customers. They can be a little fickle, but they're a key part of scaling this work. So how do we get the arrow marks of the world?

the university dining halls to really build this into what they're committed to doing. We do a little bit of direct to consumer sales. It's about 2 % of our business right now. We're always sort of teetering on, we really lean into that side of the business? I think there's a lot of demand for it.

It's just not what we built ourselves to do. And it's a different model, it's a different cost structure. And figuring out the distribution delivery side of that, shipping and, but that's always sort of a lingering like, is that 2025? Yes.

Eric (22:24)
Yeah.

It's like out there. Yeah.

Tina Levy (22:42)
Because, yeah, I think that's a frustration point for people who really do, consumers who really value what we're doing. It's like, well, where can I get it? Like Weaver Street, Durham Co-op Market, there's not a ton of retail presence for folks or ease of retail presence. And so how do we create that? I think that's a real opportunity.

Eric (23:04)
Yeah, that's great. I have one more question for you, but I also have like a confession to make. You are known in our house as Meat Tina. Anytime like we eat first hand food either at a restaurant or at home or whatever, it's like, this is from Meat Tina.

Tina Levy (23:21)
That's hilarious.

Eric (23:25)
So yeah, even today I was like, yeah, talking to my wife, said, yeah, Kelly, I'm chatting with Meet Tina today. She's like, tell her hey, da da. So yeah, talk about branding. You might want to think about Meet Tina as like a public persona for you. Yeah, it totally works for my family. All right, well, we can wrap up my wrap up question is.

Tina Levy (23:32)
That's so funny.

some kind of handle for something, yeah.

Eric (23:52)
music recommendation because I have a voracious music appetite and this is just a fun thing to talk about and here we'll leave a listen to. So what do you listen to?

Tina Levy (23:59)
Yeah, I

feel like when I see you out and about, it's usually at a show, like His Golden Messenger or something.

Eric (24:02)
Yeah. yeah, there's a

his poster right here over my shoulder.

Tina Levy (24:08)
Very nice.

So this is for the Gen X hip hop lovers out there who might be feeling a little out of touch with the hip hop scene right now. But I recently discovered Dochi. She has a new album out and so she's kind of making the rounds. She was on Colbert Report and she was on Tiny Desk Concerts and she is...

somehow pulling off this like real throwback old school feel to the music while also being extremely fresh and creative and fun and new sounding. So I was delighted to discover Dochi.

Eric (24:53)
Awesome,

how do you spell it?

Tina Levy (24:55)
D-O-E-C-H-I-I.

Eric (24:57)
All right, clearly I am not cool because I just asked how to spell it, but I will give it a listen. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that is Meet Tina, co-founder of First Hand Foods. Thank you, Tina.

Tina Levy (25:11)
Thank you.