When your restaurant's reputation relies on providing fresh, beefy burgers, affordably priced and served up fast, you're particular about the provider of your patties. And when those patties need to be the same shape, size, texture and taste your customers have enjoyed for decades, you need a vendor that can deliver — literally — as much meat as hungry diners demand.
For Spokane's D. Lish Hamburgers, that provider is Angus Meats, a distributor that also performs select meat processing and packaging. Angus serves primarily wholesale — restaurants, hotels, schools, grocery stores — with an evolving retail market offering.
Angus Meats, which recently celebrated 50 years in business, has outlasted its competitors by offering quality products, building relationships with chefs and continuously adapting its business model.
"We've been using Angus since we opened," says Mike Lish, whose parents and a former business partner opened the hamburger joint in 1998.
D. Lish goes through a lot of meat, which gets delivered several times a week, because their business model focuses on fresh meat. During a recent 10-day period, D. Lish went through 111 cases of burgers, or roughly 7,700 patties, Lish says. All of it from Angus.
"They just had the best tasting meat," he adds.
Ditto, says Christopher J. Beck, chef de cuisine at Spencer's For Steaks and Chops in downtown Spokane, which has sourced from Angus for more than 20 years.
"Using Angus gives us the best product around and a better customer service unlike anyone else," Beck says.
Customer service at Angus Meats means Tom, says Curtis Smith, a longtime instructor at Spokane Community College's culinary program. He's talking about Angus co-owner Tom Stachecki.
Tom's father, George, founded the business in 1972, and Tom worked his way up through the company since his teens, learning all the bones of the business.
Now, Stachecki handles production, while his wife, Leslie, is the detail person for the company, including managing the staff of 24.
Together, the couple have beefed up Angus Meats considerably since purchasing it from Stachecki's parents in 2000. Although it's still called Angus Meats, a more accurate term would be Angus Brands, the umbrella over both the wholesale and small-but-growing line of retail products like bulk meat packages.
Smith first heard about Stachecki and Angus Meats in 1993 when he was helping open Tito's Italian Grill & Wine Shop (when it was Tito Macaroni's), inside the Coeur d'Alene Resort Shops.
"Tom was the primary meat purveyor for the resort because he was local and he would cut anything any way you wanted, no matter how unique you wanted it," Smith says.
Angus Meats still does that, like for downtown's Wooden City Spokane, which wanted a bone-in pork chop with the fat cap and deckle attached, similar to the prized parts of a bone-in beef ribeye.
"Most large cutters or producers aren't selling this product despite the fact that it's the best way to enjoy a pork chop," says Wooden City co-owner, Jon Green.
When customers call Angus Meats about an order, says Smith, they get Stachecki and they get answers. If there's an issue with a steak, for example, Stachecki "can walk out of his office and walk into the production room and talk to the guy who is cutting that steak."
You don't get that with a generalized food distribution company, says Smith. Stachecki earned respect from the chefs he works with by asking for feedback and attending and supporting events.
"He was always a local supporter of chefs," Smith adds.
Stachecki is also a bit of a meat geek. He can tell you how D. Lish's burgers are made and why they're superior. For D. Lish's burgers and similar accounts, Angus Meats blends 95 percent lean beef with steak trimmings, keeping the mix at a bracing 28 to 29 degrees.
"Temperature is critical for a longer shelf life and better beefy taste," Stachecki says.
The company's patented patty-making machine helps align the meat fibers in a vertical pattern as it extrudes them quickly and efficiently in seconds, a "whak, whak, whak" sound continuous on the processing floor.
Making patties this way, explains Stachecki, promotes more even cooking. "This allows the internal temperature to get to 160 degrees quicker without making the patty dry," he says. "A dry patty also loses most of its beef flavor."
In addition, the 40-year-old machine makes them the same way now as it did when Mike Lish's dad, Dave, first began ordering burgers from Angus Meats.
How does the company's model translate to home cooks? It's a work in progress.
In 2008 Angus Meats contracted chef Smith with SCC to develop meal kits, which were available at local grocers.
"It's like anything else out there," says Leslie Stachecki. "You create something, you try it in the market, and then you see what was successful."
Although the meal kits met stiff industry competition and have been suspended for now, Angus Meats found a better niche in bulk meat packages, especially since the pandemic. The company now offers a range of packages — beef, chicken, pork, lamb — with shipping and local delivery options. (Order at angusbrands.com.)
The 35-piece seasonal pack ($80) is very popular. It includes 20 chicken breasts, four petite sirloin steaks, four 1-pound packs of lean ground beef, two packages of sausage links, a pound of beef stew meat and eight pork loin chops.
"There's probably close to 50 different products," says Ruth Morgan, Angus Meats' business manager, who joined the company during the pandemic and has been helping amplify its online presence. "But you can also buy one-offs if you want, like, you could buy a single pound of bacon if you wanted to."
The number of products could and probably will change, depending on feedback from customers, which, says Morgan, is one of the strengths she's observed with the company's business model.
"I think if you don't have that, no matter what you are, if you're a business or just an individual, you would have kind of a hard time growing and rolling with the punches." ♦
