Melvin Edes is cut differently than most. In a world of grocers that over the past 50 years have tried to be one-size-fits-all, moved to models of scale and shed specialty departments like meat counters operated by trained butchers, Melvin specialized.
The 75-year-old entrepreneur is a man obsessed with meat.
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It is an obsession that defined Melvin’s life’s work, and it is a lifetime of work that has established his name in the Texas Panhandle with high-end beef: Edes Custom Meats.
If Melvin is honest, his is a journey that got its start when he was 16 and working for a grocery store chain that eventually wound up with a business model and philosophy antithetical to his own.
It was a start that laid the groundwork for all that he would build and, unbeknownst to him at the time, introduced him to those with whom he would finish his career nearly six decades in the future.
But more about that later.
Beginnings of something great
Melvin’s entrepreneurial career began as an 8-year-old delivering newspapers. Subscriptions swelled from 40 to 150 by the time he hung up his satchel and bike at the age of 11.
Stints washing dishes at a drive-in and busing tables at the Herring Hotel occupied his early adolescent years. By the time he was a sophomore at Amarillo High School, he was already head cook at a local Dairy Queen.
That meant he was getting home at midnight and showing up at school exhausted.
As Melvin tried to keep his eyes open in class one day, a teacher told him the Safeway on Grand Street was hiring a clean-up boy.
The job paid 75 cents per hour, 50 cents less than Melvin was making at the Dairy Queen. He didn’t care. He just wanted to be in bed by 8 p.m. every night.
He remembers walking into that Safeway on Sept. 18, 1957, for his first day of work. The market manager, a red-haired World War II veteran from Elk City, Okla., announced that Melvin would be boning carcasses at night. The manager began showing Melvin different cuts of meat.
“There was so much to learn, I said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,'” Melvin said. “He said, ‘Yes you can. It’ll just take a while.'”
He learned some lessons at the Grand Street store, then moved on to the store at the corner of Southeast 10th Avenue and South Taylor Street, then Wolflin Village. At the age of 24, he returned to the location on Grand as the market manager.
Stints in Pampa, Lubbock and Portales, N.M., followed before he was assigned to a new store at the corner of South Bell Street and Southwest 34th Avenue in 1975.
It was a plum job at Safeway’s best regional store, where district manager Dale McKee – a fair and well-respected boss, Melvin said – had assigned his three sons Gary, Terry and Brian to work.
That was a different time, when butchers had to sell everything they had in stock. Now, Melvin gripes, they just cut what they want and scrap the rest.
After 25 years of work in the meat department, Melvin knew the butcher trade inside and out.
But when Safeway cut his paycheck and bonus in 1980 and began using “second-grade beef,” leading to more customer complaints in two years than Melvin had encountered in the previous 23, he started to think about setting out on his own.
He already ran a small butcher shop from his father’s barn in rural Randall County as a side gig. The Edes family had been grinding sausage in Northeast Texas for generations.
Maybe he had the institutional knowledge to make it on his own – even if his customers would have to drive out of their way, south of Amarillo.
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He decided to give it a try.
Different paths
By the time Melvin decided to strike out on his own, Dale McKee – that district manager he liked so much – had also moved on. He, too, spent a quarter-century with Safeway before being ousted by what one son describes as a “hatchet man.” Gary says his father’s termination was an example to other district managers.
McKee was resilient and, like Edes, a self-starter. His brother had found success in convenience stores, founding an Oklahoma chain called Wag-A-Bag that had 16 locations at the time.
Maybe mini-marts were in the blood. McKee opened his first store in Canyon with a similarly hyphenated name: Pak-A-Sak.
With 21 locations across the Texas Panhandle, the McKee name became synonymous with convenience stores the same way Edes became with fine meats. Both are businesses that have been more than three decades in the making.
A convergence
Dale McKee has retired. And, at 75, Melvin doesn’t feel like the spring chicken he once was – though he’s far from inactive – so he made a business decision about 18 months ago that flew under the radar.
Continuing to work 12-hour days was not what he wanted for himself and his wife at this point in life, so he sold Edes Custom Meats to the sons of McKee, his longtime friend.
“You can’t keep going forever … and I couldn’t turn age around and go backwards,” Melvin says. “I went to the Pak-A-Sak guys and said, ‘Hey, this is going to be better for y’all than anybody I know,’ and they thought it would be a good idea. I wasn’t shopping, trying to sell it. It just happened.”
Brothers Gary, Terry and Brian McKee bought Melvin’s project in entrepreneurialism in January 2016 as part of a brand expansion of Pak-A-Sak.
Now, they are building on Melvin’s name and brand, combining it with their own but staying true to many of the tenets that made Edes Custom Meats a local household name.
The brothers will soon open Edes Meat Market, a butcher shop and delicatessen, at a shopping center under construction near Hillside Road and South Bell Street.
Homemade pies, freshly prepared sandwiches and casseroles will all be available for carry-out. Craft beer and bottled wine will be available for purchase. The Winpark Place store will also sell the fresh, cut-to-order meats for which the shop at 6700 W. McCormick Road is known.
“Even though it appears like there are some changes, there really aren’t,” operations manager Jack Hensley said. “All it comes down to is expansion. We’re seeing if we can possibly grow the business, and we’re making it more convenient for more people so they don’t have to drive all the way out here (6700 W. McCormick Road).”
And that beef jerky for which Edes Custom Meats is so famous and that Pak-A-Sak has carried in its stores for 16 years?
A quartet of state-of-the-art smokehouses opening in the next few months will double Edes’ machinery count and produce three to four times as much beef jerky as it has in the past, Hensley said.
“With the success that Melvin has had with his business, we decided to not change anything about the quality of his products, and only tweak a few areas of operations,” Terry McKee said.
They know that getting the business to where it is now has been a labor of love for Melvin and a long time in the making.
Building a business
Local butcher shops have gone the way of fax machines and record players as beef and pork production have become increasingly centralized during the last 20 years.
Edes estimates there were 3,000 plants similar to his in Texas and Oklahoma when he opened in September 1983. Now he thinks it may be closer to 300.
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So how did Edes Meats grow at a time when its peers were getting their lunch eaten by Smithfield Foods and Tyson?
“Edes Meats is not grocery store meat,” Edes said. “I don’t care what the grocery store does; they’re not going to do what Edes Meats does to make the meat good … it’s like eating steak against sausage.”
He says Edes Custom Meats is not about beef that is either partially or completely processed elsewhere, divided into cuts, boxed and shipped cross-country where it is minimally butchered, if at all, and laid out for display before being repackaged for the end consumer.
Edes’ beef comes from Bar-G Feedyard in Summerfield – on the hoof. The animals finish their lives at the McCormick Road plant’s 31-acre lot. They are humanely dispatched and then hung in walk-in freezers where they are dry-aged from two to four weeks.
Edes also processes its pork, lambs and goats in a similar fashion, starting with the live animal.
Ground beef with an Edes Custom Meats label is 100 percent shoulder muscle devoid of trimmings, and pork products are not ballooned with water injections – a common practice for some sellers. Customers can taste when butchers cut corners, Melvin says.
He likes to say he cuts steaks, not corners. This is the man who audited meat science classes at Texas A&M, Oklahoma State and even the University of Wisconsin in his quest to improve quality.
More than once, Melvin’s started a conversation with someone by pulling out a picture to show them the perfect amount of marbling on a steak. He’s the guy who dragged his wife to vacation destinations ranging from Las Vegas to Orlando, though almost all of them involved meetings about meat.
Quality is No. 1. And Melvin has the ribbons and plaques to back it up.
The future
The McKees love that about him.
Part of the purchase agreement was Edes staying on for four months to complete the transition. More than a year after that, he still acts as a brand ambassador, checking in once or twice a week to make sure nothing substantive changes.
That plastic packaging the McKees now use to keep the jerky they ship fresh – Melvin worries it might slightly alter the meat’s taste.
He’s been vocal about it, and customers can still buy “the real McCoy” in original brown paper bags at Pak-A-Sak stores.
Rather than mess with Melvin’s model, the McKees kept all 35 people employed at Edes Custom Meats at the time of the Pak-A-Sak sale.
Others such as Sandra Rains, a 25-year United Supermarkets deli manager, have been recruited in the expansion and to get the Edes Meat Market on Hillside off the ground.
The new owners hope the meat market and delicatessen will serve as the business’ vehicle into the modern world.
Hensley said Edes Meat Market also wants to tap into unsophisticated chefs’ limited culinary skills, including sending them home with recipes on how to properly cook the meat of their choice.
“The younger generation – a percentage of them, to be honest – don’t really know how to cook,” Hensley said. “If they can pick something up that’s already prepared and all they’ve got to do is warm it up, that’s pretty cool.”
The deli will serve pulled pork, chopped brisket and other meats between slices of Two Knives Catering bread, plus whole loaves of bread with sliced lunch meats. Wheels of brie. Mascarpone cheese.
There are departures from what might be found at the location south of town, but about 75 percent of the products carried at the longstanding McCormick Road plant will be sold at Edes Meat Market.
Cold cuts for simple sandwiches such as turkey and cheese or ham croissants are being sourced from Boar’s Head, not the current Edes plant. Some of the deli meats may be mass-produced, but Rains said the quality is still top-of-the-line.
If you ask Melvin Edes, though, he’ll tell you: The best meat is slaughtered out on McCormick Road.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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