IG drama
WOW! I’d Be pissed off. I wonder if people could tell. I hope Costco and Marconda aren’t cheating me.
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This is no joke. This former employee’s IG highlights were taken from the Belcampo SM fridge. I saw it get picked up from @KatherineSpiers twitter feed yesterday.
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“Unable to source specific cuts from our own farms,” their whole brand is grow what we sell, happy cows etc. “We do it all from start to finish” literally the first line from a Google search.
As if the Santa Monica store is going rogue.
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I hadn’t thought about Belcampo in ages. A friend replied to my tweet that he orders from them and it always comes straight from West Coast Prime. He assumed they had a distribution deal. Belcampo’s response posted above here is inane.
I do wonder about the flavor, though. To me grain-fed and grass-fed beef taste wildly different, so I don’t know how this went on for so long.
https://twitter.com/KevinFerguson/status/1396930546656186369
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This is pretty scandalous.
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“meat you can trust — transparency from start to finish”
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There will be a class action on file by close of business. What they did is bad enough but the PR statement is even worse, somehow.
I have newfound appreciation for the fact that Standing’s is often out of various cuts and opts not to sell anything rather than “substitute” inferior product.
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To me, that is the way to handle the situation. Sell your own stuff (esp if that’s your tagline) and then simply tell people you’re out for the day when you’ve run out.
TBH, I think it’s also bordering on offensive, given what they charge.
For everyone else: any thoughts as to how long this has been going on and if it affected the dine-in area? I don’t eat enough red meat often enough to be able to distinguish grain vs. grass-fed, but I do remember being unimpressed w/ the burger I had during the SaMo location’s soft opening and wondering what the fuss was about…
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The pickup / delivery menu lists some items as Belcampo and others not, which is a change from the in-house menus, which specify Belcampo for every item.
https://ordering.belcampo.com/en/onlineorder/belcampo#/menu
https://belcampo.com/pages/santa-monica-menu
The Belcanto meat counters I’ve visited (not Santa Monica’s) have always had a limited selection of cuts.
Feel like I should be more offended but to be honest I never thought the burgers at Belcampo were worth going out of your way for. Not bad per se but never craveable.
I do like the idea of their business model but it sounds like maybe they grew too fast to keep up with demand from their stores. Hope they can make it right but if they go under because of this I won’t be surprised.
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It’s offensive. And gaslighting, to borrow a phrase from the discourse. Not to mention what they charge for offal and off cuts.
No idea how long it’s been going on, but would guess a good while. It’s like abusers: first time caught is rarely the first time.
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The bus is always on time in Santa Monica.
Fernald emphasized that all locations are held to the same standards for their sourcing, but that individual shops have autonomy when there are supply shortages on certain items. “The preliminary results of our investigation show that unfortunately protocols both for sourcing and communicating product origin to customers were not being followed in our Santa Monica location. These errors made up a small percentage of total product,” Fernald wrote.
Although Fernald did not specify the procedures that stores have to follow or how these products did not meet its standards, she did say that the Santa Monica location has switched to products exclusively from Belcampo and its partner farms, and that the company is “implementing careful retraining and education around our protocols and accountability for our employees and leadership to ensure this does not happen again.”
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Did they hire Jess Koslow’s crisis PR person?
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I wouldn’t rush to judgment. Anya Fernald is well-educated and has demonstrated competence in the food business for over 20 years, pretty much the opposite of Jessica Koslow.
If it was a company-wide problem, other employees and ex-employees will surely come forward. Certainly there’s pressure to fudge things, since there’s high demand for some cuts and little or none for others. Seems to me like a good argument against the same company owning ranches and restaurants.
That’s why I wonder how long this has been going on. I vaguely recall @TonyC waxing lyrical about the Belcampo GCM burger. And then I tried the SaMo one and was like, “Meh.” And I REALLY LIKE burgers, so it takes quite a bit for me to feel indifferent.
Not sure how you educate purposeful deception out of people (and apparently a fair amt of stupidity since they were shipping product w/o re-labeling it), but… good luck w/ that.
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Where did you get that?
They were filling orders that were described on the menus as Belcampo with meat from other suppliers, or stocking the meat counter with other suppliers’ meat without changing the labels accordingly.
From the link to the Tweet posted in #39 on this thread.
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