Crowd Cow is an American online meat delivery marketplace. It connects fisheries and ranchers who raise livestock with consumers who want to buy meat.
Based in Seattle, Crowd Cow was founded in 2015 by Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry. The company initially shipped beef to customers and later expanded their offerings to include chicken, pork, lamb, and seafood. Crowd Cow provides customers with background about the ranches from which it sources its meat. The company markets its meat as following the sustainable agriculture principles and for ethical treatment of farm animals. It sells grass-fed and grass-finished beef and the ranchers it sources from do not use hormones or superfluous antibiotics.
Crowd Cow began importing Japanese A5 Wagyu beef in 2017. It received criticism for importing Wagyu beef from Japan while American beef ranchers had challenges competing with foreign producers. The company raised $25million from investors, including Maveron, Zulily founders Darrell Cavens and Mark Vadon, Joe Montana, and Ashton Kutcher.
History
Crowd Cow was established in mid-2015 by Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry. They had met each other in the 2000s at Avogadro, a mobile startup later purchased by Openwave. Heitzeberg was the founder of Snapvine. Lowry was the co-founder of the restaurant recommendation service Urbanspoon, and had previously been the owner with Heitzeberg of Hack Things, a company that teaches software engineers about the production of computer hardware. The name "Crowd Cow" was inspired by the founders' using the crowdfunding of meat from cows to establish the company.
The two co-founders discussed startup concepts together and thought back to a shared friend who repeatedly praised the entire cow he had purchased from a Western Washington farm. The friend had made purchases every year of a supply of beef to share with another person. Lowry was the only person who consumed meat in his household since his wife is a vegetarian. Although he was unable to rationalize purchasing of meat through a farm for himself, he thought it would be feasible if he could get 50 people to participate. Lowry and Heitzeberg visited a Starbucks to conduct research, asking patrons for their opinions. The response largely fell into two categories: "I'm a vegetarian, don't bother me" and "That sounds absolutely amazing". They had prior involvement around 2013 in Kickstarter when they crowdfunded to create the product Poppy, which transformed iPhones into stereo cameras and wanted to use Kickstarter to test their idea. The pair were drawn to the notion of purchasing a farm's meat without going through an intermediary. They did not know anyone who sold cattle, so they conducted Google searches and visited farmers' markets and butchers but remained unable to find anyone who could help them. The co-founders next made unsolicited calls to nearby farms that typically went to voicemail. When they reached someone from a farm, that person would be skeptical of their plans. The duo in the end found two farms that they visited and were able to set up an agreement with. After locating a farm to sell beef to them, they sent an email to 100 friends about their plans. They conducted a Kickstarter campaign for testing purposes in which they hoped to sell portions of a cow they had purchased from a tiny farm near Seattle. Their website received 600 visits, and they took one day to sell their initial cow in the middle of June 2015 through orders from friends and people living in Washington, Chicago, New York, and Florida. The founders had little knowledge about selling beef. When they attempted to purchase an entire cow, they learned that they were actually looking for steer. Whereas cows are female cattle raised to make milk, steer are male cattle raised for slaughter.