Olaf Growald
Trey Quinn and his daughter Olivia work a herd of Akaushi cattle in Stephenville.
Trey Quinn had always kept in the back of his mind a vision of a full-service beef company — cradle to grave and a place on the shelves of a retail store or a restaurant freezer.
For several years, he had been raising and backgrounding cattle to sell or to finish at feedlots in Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska.
And then the pandemic descended from the sky like an Old Testament horror story, taking us back in time kicking and screaming — and masked — to the days of ancestors. The blasted pandemic turned normalcy into a novelty for just about all of us, including Quinn and his wife, Amy.
Since 2017, Quinn had been breeding Akaushi calves. He had had a commercial operation with angus cattle for years, but curiosity and lots of research led him to buying two Akaushi bulls from Texas-based HeartBrand Beef, which has a commanding presence in Akaushi genetics in the U.S. He was breeding to an angus cow, an F1 cross that certifies the beef as Akaushi. Once the cattle had reached “finishing” stage, he had an arrangement to sell them back to HeartBrand, which then processed them and took them to the retail market.
“If nothing had changed, including the agreement we had, we would have kept going as it was,” he says. “We’d have kept six back a year, sell some halves. I would have gotten a premium for selling them. And I still would have enjoyed it.”
It did change, of course. The pandemic led to the shutdown that caused the closure of restaurants and eateries. Beef stacked up like oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico with nowhere to go. Processing facilities began to go dark, and some shut down altogether.
“I got a call one day” from HeartBrand, says Quinn, “and they told me they couldn’t buy back the cattle. I told them, ‘I get it.’”
He had Akaushi cattle that were finishing at the feedlot ready for processing but now nowhere to go. And more on the way, also with nowhere to go. He basically had to give away those ready for slaughter.
Now he had to come up with a plan promptus for the calves on the way, about eight months out.
“I got out over my skis a little bit,” he says. “I told Amy, ‘Let’s do it ourselves. We’ll just do it ourselves. I’ve done this for years. I can do this.’”
That was how Quinn’s drastic pandemic pivot began. USDA- and Akaushi-certified Quinn Beef was born in the midst — and a result of — crisis. Certainly not an unheard-of scenario for entrepreneurs. He readily acknowledges that had he planned to expand the business he had going under normal circumstances, he would have needed probably close to two years to plan and sort out all the logistics involved. And there are many moving parts that under the pressing timelines have required a kind of quick thinking reserved for the clever and nimble.
However, Quinn, a graduate of Arlington Heights, also was able to leverage existing expertise.
The cattle operation was what he called a “side hustle.” His day job comes with the title of vice president at AZZ Inc.’s metal coatings division in Fort Worth.
But, he had grown up in the world of agriculture and ranching operations. His father, Mickey Quinn, owned and operated Cattle Raisers Supply Co. in the Stockyards for more than 40 years. Quinn has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas A&M and Texas Tech in ag economics and ag finance. As an Aggie, he was a calf roper on the rodeo team. He continued in rodeo on into the pro circuit with the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.
A job at AmeriCredit in the late 1990s was the first he ever had indoors, he says.
“Growing up, I was always out cowboying,” he says. “I always loved horses and cattle. My dad knew all these ranch people, and they told him, ‘When he gets old enough, send him out here.’ So, I spent summers and Christmas vacations working on ranches. I got to work on some ranches most never do. It wasn’t like I was one of their cowboys. I was a guest for sure, but I was working.
“I loved it.”
Among them was the storied Four Sixes of the famed Burnett properties. In the summer after his freshman year at A&M, he went to work at a feed yard in Colorado. The feed yard is where livestock are fattened for market.
His mentors told him to learn about the mill.
The cattle-feeding industry is a behemoth in Texas — that’s not so much a secret — and her neighbors. The industry has a total economic impact of $16.8 billion across the region of Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, according to the Texas Cattle Feeders Association.
“I learned a lot,” he says. “Feeding cattle is an art and a science. You have to be able to read cattle. They change like us. Some days they’re more hungry than other days.”
Akaushi were introduced to the U.S. on a Boeing 747. That sounds like the start of an Aggie joke, but it’s true according to Progressive Farmer. The livestock didn’t exist outside of Japan until 1994, the year eight females and three males were shipped to the U.S. on a specially equipped 747.
Akaushi — “red beauties,” as some call them — are one of four breeds known collectively as “Wagyu,” or “Japanese cow.” Akaushi in the native tongue of its motherland is known as the “Emperor’s Breed.”
According to the American Akaushi Association, the breed has been crossed with 13 other breeds: English, Continental, and American. In each case, they have doubled the grade and improved yield. No other breed can make that claim. The common denominator, according to the Association, was the Akaushi bull.
Today, there are roughly 2,000 full-blooded Akaushi bulls and 8,700 full-blooded females that make up the U.S. Akaushi population. A bull goes for between $6,000-$7,000.
At the time Quinn bought his bulls, HeartBrand was paying a 20-cent premium for each pound of DNA-verified Akaushi beef.
Before he had bought his bulls at the suggestion of a cattle broker, Quinn purchased some of the meat to try. “It was like nothing I had ever eaten,” he says. “The beef was off the charts. It sold me right there. We bought some more to try to make sure.”
Akaushi cattle have the genetics to consistently grade prime, processors and brokers say. That is what the years of documentation and breeding in Japan prior to coming to the U.S. made sure of.
The beef is also better for the consumer because it has higher levels of oleic acid — that is, the good fat found in olive oil — and conjugated linoleic acid than other beef. It also has more monounsaturated fat than saturated fat. As Progressive Farmer pointed out, “It’s not a lean product — it’s more of an anti-lean product — with its value and health benefits derived from its marbling.”
Mike Newton, a chef contestant on Season Eight of Gordon Ramsey’s “MasterChef,” featured tomahawk cuts from Quinn Beef at his restaurant in Stephenville, Newton’s at the Cellar.
Consider him onboard.
The limited-time special did very well, Newton says. An osso buco shank special is in the works for late February or early March, Newton adds.
“I loved them; they had great flavor and marbling to them,” Newton says of the tomahawk special. “Nice cuts. People have got such a generic style of beef nowadays. These were really, really nice.”
Quinn jokes — sort of — of his invitation to Texas A&M for a seminar roundtable discussion on his experience with the Akaushi breed, and, more broadly, taking on the cradle-to-grave beef business.
“Beware what you wish for,” he says he told one person.
Again, he’s joking. Again, sort of.
Ultimately, he wants to grow the business into possibly a store front. Currently, the Quinns sell their product at quinnbeef.com. It’s literally a mom-and-pop operation. Amy Quinn handles most of the marketing and sales with help from Ranch House Designs Inc. Also out there working cattle you’ll find their daughter, Olivia, as confident on a horse as an actor on a stage.
Amy was charged with the task of finding a processor when many were either out of business or taking only three here and four there.
“I pulled up the list of every meat processor in Texas, which lists about 300 different places," Amy says. "Many of them don’t process beef, only wild game. I’m guessing I called at least 75 different places, over two days. I would Google the place first and if it looked reputable, I called. At that point, it didn’t matter how far away it was. I will say, everyone was sympathetic and many of them had long waiting lists that they would add our name to.”
Amy arranged a call with her husband and Dean and Peeler Premium Beef of Floresville, Texas, near San Antonio.
The Quinns were told they didn’t have any openings for six months. Trey Quinn asked them to keep him in mind if there were any cancellations.
“A few weeks later, they called,” Quinn says. “‘Can you be here tomorrow?’”
Quinn loaded four head from his Akaushi feeding operation in Stephenville. He leases land down there from Kevin Parker’s ranch.
“I’ve never been anywhere else,” Quinn says. “First class. They do a lot of cattle like ours. There are a lot of good processors out there, but Dean and Peeler just fits us. And I like them. They’re good to me.”
Dean and Peeler also have an expertise in all the cuts that the Akaushi offer, such as the tri-tip, flat iron steak, beef short ribs, and a petite tender.
Collaboration and building relationships have been key ingredients to getting this thing off the ground. Another issue Quinn confronted was storage. He suddenly had thousands of pounds of meat.
Joe Musacchio of Cinnamon Creek Ranch, who placed an order for ground beef, has been involved in processing for years. He asked about the soaking baptism of doing it yourself. During that conversation, Quinn asked Musacchio if he had any storage space available.
“I had about 8,000 pounds of meat, and I didn’t have anywhere to go,” Quinn says. “He said, ‘Yes.’ He was nice enough to give me freezer space.”
Musacchio had saved Quinn’s life, he says, figuratively of course. What he saved was literally thousands of dollars. An inevitable fire sale would have ensued had freezers not come available.
Everybody needs friends, especially entrepreneurs, lest they be left out in the cold.
That’s cowboy culture, lending a hand when your horse runs into a swollen stream.
And the Quinns, rest assured, will repay the favor to someone else one of these days. Probably sooner than later because the best of business and steak lies just ahead at Quinn Beef.
"The fact that we are all working as a family for this business to grow is so important," Amy says. "Our kids are eating the same food we raise — we sustain the land, the wildlife, the livestock, and our kids. Because of that we are always sensitive to making sure we are doing things the right way, every day."