Everything happens for a reason, and you may not see that reason right away.
In 2013 when Moses Family Jerky was started our supplier at the time quickly doubled our original agreed price per pound for our preferred cut of meat. Obviously watching your margins be destroyed right in front of your eyes is a terrible feeling for an entrepreneur. I quickly began to call every meat supplier in the area including a local grocery store chain, Nell's Shurfine. At the time these were the only guys who could give us anywhere close to a price we could work with and still be profitable.
A few weeks went by with no issues, and then Shurfine told me they couldn't keep up with our orders and directed us to their suppliers, Wayne Nell and Sons Meats Inc. Shane Nell invited me into his business and treated us extremely well. Honestly, looking back on it, he treated us better than he probably should have considering that we were buying such a small quantity of meat and asking for wholesale prices. Shane went on to help me grow MFJ by learning to slice out meat to save me a step, giving tons of suggestions in production and even sharing part of his farmers market stand to let me sell jerky when no other market would give us a shot.
In November 2015 Shane brought up that he would be interested in investing. Ha! He was probably joking! What he didn't know was my mom, you know the person kept us in business by feeding, housing and supporting me when our monthly sales goals were $100, had just lost her job. I quickly took him up on his offer and we got to work.
We worked together on moving from a 3 pound batch of jerky using small table top dehydrators to a 200 pound batch of jerky in an industrial dehydrator. It wasn't an overnight success. It took 10 months and multiple failed batches of jerky to get us to where we needed to me. Now September 9th I am happy to announce were ready to move production to East Berlin and finally be approved to wholesale! Using their equipment and our recipe will allow us to bring an extremely fresh, and industry changing product to stores.
This is the end of one chapter and the start of a new one. Dreams do come true.