It began with a 15-liter hand-cranked stuffer.
That’s where Maarten Van Zoeren of Simla Frozen Food Locker in southeastern Colorado pins the birth of his meat processing business.
Maarten came to the United States in 1990 at the age of 15 when his parents immigrated from the Netherlands to the small eastern Colorado community of Simla. They bought a frozen food locker there and began processing local meat.
Someone once said, “Meat processing isn’t rocket science; it’s more difficult.”
Smaller meat processors have certainly been navigating challenges in recent years that would vex the brightest aerospace engineers. Coming out of the pandemic, a severe slaughter capacity shortage threatened the viability of many ranchers. Then, just as more slaughter capacity began to emerge, Mother Nature brought on a drought that—along with screwworm and other factors—has reduced the nation’s cattle herd to the lowest level in more than a decade. And byproduct disposal is a persistent problem that keeps smaller processors at a competitive disadvantage.
