CONRAD - Lisa Schmidt, with A Land of Grass Ranch near Conrad, is building a small-scale food manufacturing facility called "From the Ground Up" where she plans to turn Montana-raised beef and lamb into shelf-stable meals.
“All my ideas start with a crop failure,” Schmidt said. “Every single one of them. And I had a crop failure about 15 years ago. It wasn’t a crop failure. It was a freezer failure.”
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Schmidt said that failure left her with partially thawed raw meat she did not want to throw away. She asked her brother-in-law what to do, and he suggested canning it.
“I’d never heard of canned meat before, but I went and bought a big home pressure cooker and some jars, and I put it in there, and it tasted delicious,” Schmidt said. “I thought, 'I’ve got to do something about this and market my meat this way.'”
Years later, that idea is now taking shape.
In "From the Ground Up," Schmidt uses a large retort pressure cooker to make shelf-stable meals in pouches. She spent time trying and creating recipes like beef stew, lamb stew, lamb curry and beef pasta sauce.
The process is designed to cook the food safely so it can be stored on a shelf instead of in a freezer.
Schmidt said the challenge with shelf-stable meat meals is ensuring the meat is cooked long enough to be safe while keeping it from losing its quality.
“It’s the mushy vegetable conundrum,” Schmidt said. “That’s the problem.”
She said older retort technology could process shelf-stable foods, but it was not efficient enough for the kind of product she wanted to make.
She said the newer retort heats and cools quickly enough to keep the meat safe while still helping the vegetables taste good.
The facility is not yet in full production. Schmidt said she is still working through equipment checks, testing, USDA inspection and labelling. She expects to be up and running this summer with her first production batch.
Once production begins, Schmidt said the meals could offer another option for customers who want local meat but may not have the freezer space, time or need to buy in bulk.
“The cool thing about these pouches is that they’re shelf-stable for a long, long time, and they’re ready to eat,” Schmidt said.
She said the meals could be useful for busy families, seniors, people looking for quick meals and those who want food they can store for emergencies.
The project could also create opportunities beyond Schmidt’s own ranch.
She raises cattle and sheep and markets her beef and lamb directly, but she expects to buy some meat from other Montana producers as the business grows.
She said that could include cuts that are often harder for ranchers to sell directly, such as stew meat.
“There’s enough meat in Montana to supply me, and so it kind of works for everybody,” Schmidt said.
She also hopes that "From the Ground Up" can eventually support other small food producers who need a place to process shelf-stable products at a smaller scale.
“There’s potential to help other Montana ranchers, but there’s also potential to help other people who are developing food products take it from a commodity to a food at a small scale,” Schmidt said.
For Schmidt, the goal is to make Montana-raised food easier to use, easier to store and ready when people need it — while keeping it connected to the land and livestock it came from.
