Owner: Brandy Uchtman
Location: Fordland, Mo.
Training and experience: Brandy Uchtman attended College of the Ozarks where she worked for four years in the university’s processing plant.
“You can do classes, but it’s not required,” she said. “I didn’t really take any classes for it.”
History: While at College of the Ozarks, Brandy had a class project during her senior year.
“It was to do a business plan. The only thing that I had ever been around was the processing plant and raising cattle,” she recalled. “So I did something that would be easy to me and went with the processing plant, because I could always refer to the one at school for the project. Then it was more and more a good idea. This place was available and it was here in Fordland. I needed something to do whenever I graduated, so I just went with it.”
Brandy opened B’s Meats on the opening day of deer season in 2016.
“I didn’t know if I was going to be up and running,” she said. “We were working on the cooler. I went and bought it on a Wednesday and deer season was on Saturday. So I didn’t do any advertising; nothing. We had a couple of hundred deer. The next year it doubled. This year we’re expecting kind of the same thing. More and more people know about it.”
Products and Services: B’s Meats offers custom processing. They have re-sale meats and do processed beef, pigs and deer.
Brandy buys meat from a wholesale distributor.
“We buy it in chunks, so we cut it up when it comes in. I make the seasoning for it. We don’t buy hardly anything store bought that I don’t make, cut down and do something with.”
It is hard to say what she processes the most because it varies. She explained, “It just depends on the season. We do a lot of deer. Right now we do a lot of pigs. In the wintertime, there will be a lot of beef.”
Custom butchering is by appointment.
Brandy has a couple of part-time employees and adds a couple of additional employees during the deer season.
Future plans: Brandy said, “We started out really well. There are some days in the winter when we’re packed. So expanding in business is kind of already there.”
Philosophy: “Get done what needs to be done, and be clean and honest,” she stated.
