Crowd Cow: Beef from a local ranch to your doorstep

Of course you can buy beef at any grocery store. But if you want to buy excellent quality beef from local ranchers in small quantities, that’s not so easy to do. That’s where Seattle start-up Crowd Cow comes in. “Crowd Cow is a way to get beef from a small local ranch delivered straight to your door,” said Crowd Cow co-founder Ethan Lowry. “So you get all of the convenience of ordering online, but you get the quality of knowing exactly where your meat is coming from” “We work with western Washington ranches and source grass fed and grass finished beef and Wagyu,” he said. “Normally, the way you’d get that is you’d have to go to the ranch and you’d arrange to buy a side of beef, 250 pounds of beef. With Crowd Cow you can say, ‘Hey, I want to get a few steaks. I want some ground beef.'” Lowry is a start-up-starting junkie who also co-created the online restaurant guide Urbanspoon. The interesting thing about his latest venture is that you go in on a steer with a bunch of strangers. When a cow goes up online, people claim different cuts and only when every piece of meat is spoken for will you get your delivery. When the cow is claimed, an image of a cow will literally tip on the website. Lowry says it usually takes 2-3 days to tip a cow. “Not only do you get to have the quantity and the cuts you were looking for, but it also finds a home for the more exotic cuts,” Lowry said...more