Chicken Talk

Where a company trying to provide healthy, real, affordable food buys their chicken is a big thing it turns out! Right now, all our chicken broth is 100% pasture-raised (the best quality), but you're only paying for the organic price (the second best)!  Let me explain:

When it comes to chicken, the ideal would be to buy everything locally and pasture-raised (which is organic too), but that's not always feasible for a couple reasons: 1 - local pasture-raised chicken growers don't have huge flocks, so when it comes to making large batches of chicken broth all winter long, I haven't yet found the supply.  2 - the price. To stay as affordable as possible we usually can't be all pasture-raised - until we find the right supply prices.   Prices can look like this for a box of chicken bones for stock: $0.79 / lb conventional, $1.79 / lb organic, $4.89 / lb pasture raised!  To date I've made sure to be organic as a minimum, and for our sipping broth, to be a combination of pasture-raised and organic. 

For perspective, the way I operate the business is to set a standard ingredient percentage for our soups, and to charge according to the actual cost of the ingredients (that's why our soups all cost different amounts).  Traditionally a restaurant shoots for the ingredients being no more that 30% of the final food cost.  I allow for it to get up to around 35% to try and offer more value to our customers.  If I made our "Chicken Soup With Rice" with all pasture-raised bones at $4.89 / lb, I would have to charge $26.95 per quart to keep the ingredient costs at 35%!  I think that's too much for most people, so I use organic as my baseline.  BUT, in the May, I came across a large batch of frozen organic pasture-raised chicken bones that a local business wasn't going to use (they had removed the meat for their own purposes).  They agreed to sell them to me at the $1.79 organic price, so I bought in heavy and am now working through that inventory.  SOOOO...

ALL OUR CHICKEN BROTH AND STOCK IS CURRENTLY 100% PASTURE-RAISED - but you only have to pay what you would if they were organic.  Note: the website accurately states in the descriptions if the broth is made from pasture-raised bones, organic, or both.  Currently the chicken meat is all organic.

I hope this makes sense, and thought you'd want to know.