The company pays “more than double” the industry average on the live weight per pound, Wadiak says. It also doesn’t use a tournament system that pays growers based on performance like the big integrators. While Cooks Venture owns the birds and feed, like conventional poultry companies, it doesn’t require the growers to buy the chickens. The company also has a network of 30 producers with 100 retrofitted houses in Arkansas and Oklahoma. In 2009, Evans and Udale began working on their heirloom breed that includes Naked Neck and Delaware poultry genetics.Ĭooks Venture’s 800-acre farm in Decatur, Arkansas is home to its genetics program, 30 broiler houses, and enough pasture to allow the birds plenty of room to roam. He bred the Peterson male, the gold-standard for male-line broiler genetics for 50 years. Evans’s grandfather was a giant in the poultry industry. He joined forces with Evans and poultry geneticist Richard Udale to create Cooks Venture. Wadiak is the co-founder of the American meal-kit company Blue Apron, which he left in 2017. Commercial poultry genetics is dominated by two companies, Aviagen and Cobb-Vantress, which is owned by Tyson. They’re also prone to disease and heart problems, and they are live with chronic joint pain, according to John Webster, professor emeritus of animal husbandry at the University of Bristol, who spoke with the Humane Society in 2017. This stands in stark contrast to today’s typical broiler chickens, which are ready for slaughter in 42 days and have been bred to grow so fast and so large they can barely walk. “The birds are allowed to put on the bone density and develop organs before they really put on the muscle,” Evans says. Cooks Venture’s birds take between 55 and 62 days to reach slaughter weight they love to roam, roost, and jump and they have a much higher survival rate than conventional broilers-97 percent-without being given antibiotics. Officially launched in March 2019, it’s taken a decade to breed a slower-growing, hardier and healthier broiler chicken that thrives on pasture, says Blake Evans, another of the company’s founders. It’s the first vertically integrated poultry company in the US built to scale in 50 years and the first that’s doing it with pasture-raised heirloom birds, according to Matthew Wadiak, one of the company’s founders. Cooks Venture is a pasture-raised heirloom-poultry company that has reimagined what a vertically integrated operation looks like, from the type of chickens it produces to how its feed is grown. Cooks Venture’s goal is a lofty one: Change a monolithic industry and help reverse climate change using chickens.
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