After four years working in meat sales, Jason Pleym thought he’d gone as far as he’d wanted to go in the industry. “My wife Margot and I left our jobs and spent the summer of 2007 in Golden working at my brother’s rafting company and living in a school bus thinking about our next move,” he says.
Come fall, they returned to Vancouver with a plan to start a wholesale meat company specializing in fine local proteins free of antibiotics, hormones and chemical feed additives. Jason was already selling his father-in-law’s beef from Pemberton Natural Meadows, a seasonal cattle business, in his previous job. It just so happened that year the company was fall calving as well, which opened up the door for a year round supply line of beef. They decided to take a leap of faith and start a meat company.
In January 2008, Two Rivers Speciality Meats began supplying Margot’s father’s beef to restaurants and retailers though Jason’s existing sales relationships. “I spent a lot of time learning how to butcher, and figuring out how to break the beef a little bit differently than what’s standard in order to maximize the cuts of meat from the animal,” says Jason.
