Meat can be one of the more daunting items on our grocery lists. By this point, everyone knows the industry is far from ideal, but other than going vegetarian, people are still incorporating it as a protein source. In an industry full of jargon and misnomers, it is difficult (if not impossible) to make sense of traditional grocery store options. Luckily, whole animal butchers like John Ratliff are here to shed light on the world of meat. Based in Industry City, he has quite a few bones to pick with “big meat” and shared some hard truths about his home turf.

Tell me about yourself and how you came to run Ends Meat. 

I grew up in New Mexico and started cooking when I was 15. I went to culinary school immediately after graduating high school in Portland, Oregon. After school, I grew out of Portland, moved to Chicago and went through a high-end, fine-dining phase, where I worked at some amazing restaurants. I was tired of high-end, fine-dining restaurants and wanted to try New York in 2008. I worked at a great restaurant where Missy Robbins was the chef, and another great chef, Hillary Sterling, was the chef de cuisine. I was their sous chef doing classic Italian fare, focusing on two- or three-ingredient dishes. 

I started making salumi at home. I would finish a shift at the restaurant and then take home the leftover raw product from the restaurant in my backpack on my six-gear bike. I did that for a while and threw a lot of meat in the garbage, with some success. Anything I thought was exceptional, I would take to friends, who were all in the restaurant community. Some people started buying it from me, which turned into Ends Meat in 2011.

Working in restaurants, especially high-end ones, there’s a lot of bullsh*t around sourcing. I went out and found some remarkable farms that I could focus a business on and support. That’s when the whole animal aspect started.

In 2011, I leased 1,400 square feet in Greenpoint. I built a wall down the middle of it and rented the front side out to a guy who was upholstering couches, and I put a butcher shop on the other side of the wall.

I was bringing whole pigs hidden in boxes, acting casual while riding the only freight elevator with other people. I bought one pig every week and one beef every month. I was making fermented, dried products out of it. I wasn’t selling anything fresh. I started wholesaling to restaurants. After a couple of years, I started getting some revenue, and in my fourth year, I did enough revenue to justify a small bank loan. That’s when I moved to Industry City. They found out about me, and I did a tasting for the team behind Chelsea Market. They loved what I was doing, so they gave me a great deal. I opened here in 2015.

Whole animal butchery is probably the oldest concept in butchery. Tell me what it means to you, and why it was important to incorporate into your business. 

Any business where you’re producing a product, you’re buying raw material, and you’re buying 100% of that material. It’s bad business to throw parts away. Many people say, “It’s out of respect for the animal,” or that it only happens on a small scale, but that is false. The biggest processors in the country are some of the best utilizers of every aspect of the animal. You name it, it’s getting used, and it’s turning into a revenue source for that business. This is not about small agriculture or passion. Whole animal, for me, is about being able to buy directly from a farm. When you buy directly from a farm and it only touches your hands before reaching the consumer, the farm is going to get the best value for their animal, and the consumer is going to get the best value for their product. 

Sustainability is a pretty broad word. When I use it, I mean it in every application: sustainability for the farm, making sure their soil is the best it can be to grow the grasses; for me, sustainability is bringing in a product and being able to sell as much of it as possible, with nothing going to waste. It’s not as romantic as respect for the animal. I respect the animal along with the farm and my customers.

The idea of the business was never to be a cash cow (no pun intended). Making ends meet was always the goal. I needed to pay all my bills, farmers and staff. I can answer this way with a name like Ends Meat and truly mean it. 

You’ve earned your name. Are you selling the lesser-known products that come from animals, like bone marrow? Do you find people are interested in the health aspects of products like this?

We yield bone marrow from the humerus bone in the shoulders and the femur bone in the hind leg. We get three animals a week, which means we get 12 pieces of bone marrow, and they sell like hotcakes. They have huge beneficial properties, and they’re delicious. You can’t replicate bone marrow. When it’s cooked right, it has the texture of custard and this umami flavor. It’s packed full of collagen. The beef we work with is 100% grass-fed, and grass-fed beef has nutritional properties in general. It comes out strongly in the bones. 

Has Ends Meat ever carried any wild game or funky animals?

It goes outside of the premise of working directly with farmers. When you buy a whole animal, you have to use the whole thing. If we bought a whole bison or whole venison, we don’t have enough sales to justify it. We even have a hard time selling our grass fed, New York State lamb. People are used to lamb from Australia and New Zealand at $3 a pound, and the lamb we buy is two and half times that. We end up selling the chops and making sausage out of the rest and lose money on it. The whole animal aspect makes it harder for us to be as playful. 

There’s a term called “boxed meat,” and that’s what the meat world is. 99% of butcher shops are buying boxes of meat, and those boxes of meat contain what their customers want to buy. They don’t need to extend themselves to buy things they don’t need. It’s a way better business process. We don’t do that. 

There’s a lot of misconceptions. Natural means nothing. It means “from this planet.” It’s so hard to find words to describe what we do that other larger conglomerates haven’t used to lie to people. The answer is to have transparent conversations with people.

Do you find that people are asking more questions about the meat industry as they become more aware of its issues?

The customer base that we’ve always had wants to know exactly where their stuff comes from and wants to support a transparent business with solid ethics and consistency. Americans don’t eat a lot of organs, so we turned a lot of it into dog food. People spend a lot of money on their dogs. 

The grocery chains have a ton of stuff they lie about. One popular brand has a grass-fed line that is completely raised in confinement. The majority of these are coming from overseas. Any processed ingredient that is not a pork loin or a steak, for example, ground beef, sausage and smoked meats, only has to be 51% what you say it is. It can’t be some other protein, but you could take 51% grass fed beef and blend it with 49% grain fed beef and call it grass fed, according to the USDA. More whole animal shops have been opening, but we haven’t seen tons of customers coming in for these things. 

Recognizing that meat is part of humans’ diet and will be around for a while is important. Raising meat this way means beneficial grass, which sequesters more carbon than the animals produce. Commodity meat production is f*cking terrible, and I would like everyone to know that. Meat production has to come from our Farm Bill, and there needs to be government assistance to make regenerative agriculture successful and better protein more accessible. 

It always blows my mind that the alternative is a highly processed faux meat that takes a ton of energy to produce and is highly processed and terrible for us, instead of fixing what we’ve broken, which is the human digestive system, the environment and the integrity of the animal. 

The fake meat world will never beat big-name production companies. Three main conglomerates run 95% of the meat production in this country out of D.C. by the best lobbyists money can buy, making sure that the Farm Bill is in their favor. 

You mentioned that Industry City gave you a sweet deal when you first opened, but what else does operating out of there mean? Why is it different from a street corner or a Smorgasburg?   

I’ve never had a brick-and-mortar, so it’s hard for me to compare. Industry City’s infrastructure has always protected and supported us. The management is phenomenal. We’ve expanded here four times, and, in hindsight, I don’t know if I could have done the last near-decade in a brick-and-mortar.

I don’t have partners or investors, and I’ve put everything I’ve made back into the regrowth of the business. I can’t go to investors and say, “I need $500,000 to open a brick-and-mortar,” and I can’t raise capital on a business called Ends Meat that’s not designed to make money. Industry City is great, but they’re too good in my situation.

What’s next for Ends Meat?

Since I started the business, I knew I wanted to go under federal inspection to wholesale my salumi nationwide. Four years ago, after the Lower East Side things, I could finally focus on my federally inspected business. I constructed some space in Industry City right next to the butcher shop. It’s tiny, but I have no ceiling for whom I could sell to: grocery stores, restaurants, or distributors. There’s a federal inspector here every day. I have to be here at 5:00 a.m. It’s a different world. I see this business slowly getting traction, getting some space on grocery store shelves, getting commitments from larger distributors, and hopefully raising capital and building a larger facility. 

I would love to open another butcher shop in a neighborhood where I can be part of the community. I want to support the farms I work with, and the best way to do that is to have purchasing power.