One of Emporia’s newest businesses is offering an alternative to the bland, high-priced beef jerky offered in grocery stores.
Beef Jerky Unlimited has been open for a little under eight weeks. The shop at 7 E. Fourth Ave. is the first storefront for owner Martin Mortimer’s personal brand of beef jerky, Sioux City Jerky, which he started producing three years ago when he lived in the northwest Iowa city of the same name.
“They’re all my original flavors,” he said. “When I first started, I was doing it myself, but I was just one little guy, there was no way I could keep up with it, so now I have a factory that actually takes my flavors then they have the USDA inspection, take care of all that.”
Even though he doesn’t own his own factory — which was his original vision — he said that avoiding the high cost of such a venture allowed him to keep the price of his jerky from “skyrocketing.”
“That was one of my goals when I started making jerky. I wanted to do it all my life. I got tired of going in the stores, gas stations, paying quite a bit for it and you get a piece of leather and no flavor,” he said.
Mortimer’s jerky is cured for two days to make it tender and flavorful. His hottest flavor is Maniacal Express and a slightly less spicy flavor is Mango Twisted Habanero. In his sweet section, his most popular flavor is Sea Salt and in his original series customers enjoy the Smoked-Up Barbecue, Garlic and Pepper flavors.
Along with Beef Jerky Unlimited in Emporia, Sioux City Jerky is also sold at gas station convenience stores up in the Sioux City, Iowa, area.
Mortimer had always wanted to start a beef jerky business, but as the years passed, he never quite got around to it.
However, after surviving a life-threatening motorcycle wreck in 2015, he started a bucket list. On it, he wrote that he wanted to finish his bachelor’s degree and finally start that jerky business.
“I wasn’t real motivated to really push on it like I should have been at that point,” he said.
But then, on Jan. 25, 2018, Mortimer’s daughter and four of his grandchildren died in a devastating house fire in Pratt.
“That kind of boosted me up, so I do a lot of donating to the Children’s Miracle Network,” he said.
With a new sense of appreciation for the opportunity he had in front of him, Mortimer finished his degree. For his final project, he had to write an essay about how to start a business.
“Once I got studying what it takes, I thought, ‘Oh, that don’t look so hard,’ so that’s why I dove into it,” he said.
Mortimer said that because he’d waited until later in his life, he was able to found Sioux City Jerky without taking out loans and using his own capital instead. He began to sell his product from a kiosk at malls in the northwest Iowa, southeast South Dakota and northeast Nebraska area, and it was because he had named his business after the area where it was based that he gained early momentum.
“That worked out for me up in that neck of the woods because … seeing that name really helped me out a lot, you know, get things started and it really started, took off a whole lot faster than I thought it would,” he said.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Mortimer was forced to pack away his kiosks for a while. Around that same time, his sister — who lives in Florence, Kan. — began to have health difficulties, so Mortimer found himself driving back and forth from Iowa to Kansas to help with his sister’s pest control business.
“I thought, ‘This is crazy. I’m just going to bring my business down here, centrally locate it in this area.’ I’m from Kansas anyhow and that’s kind of how I got down here,” he said.
So far, his first foray into operating a storefront has been successful.
“It’s doing really well,” he said. “Hopefully, if it keeps doing this well, I’ll probably have someone come in and work it and I’ll probably start one [in] Wichita. I haven’t decided where else I would put it.”
One of the unexpected advantages of his location on East Fourth Avenue just off of Commercial Street is the train track behind his building.
“It’s kind of funny because I get annoyed with the noise of the train, but on the other hand, I’ve had four or five people come in and say, ‘Yeah, a train stopped me [in front of the tracks] and I looked over and seen your sign and didn’t know we had a jerky business,’” Mortimer said. “So it’s actually helped my business.”
Beef Jerky Unlimited is open from 1 - 5 p.m. Monday - Thursday and noon - 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. More information can be found at siouxcityjerky.com.
June 19, 2021 at 08:00PM
https://ift.tt/3q92xd0
New beef jerky business offers alternative to costly, mass-produced products - Emporia Gazette
https://ift.tt/2RxTDX4
Beef
No comments:
Post a Comment