In 1978, a group of family ranchers didn’t just dream about high-quality Angus beef, they made it happen with a plan. For the next seven years, the beef brand was officially headquartered in Mick Colvin’s home office in West Salem, Ohio.
In that mudroom office, Tim Hussman, Colvin’s second employee, worked away… when he was in town. Hussman journeyed across the country, traveling to nearly every state, building a distributor base that remains the integral core of today’s market.
“The restaurants and retail stores were excited to have something different,” says Hussman, now president of Newport Meat Company near Los Angeles. “There wasn’t that type of quality of beef in the marketplace at the time.”
Young visionary companies signed on with the new beef brand as fast as it could supply them. After a formative decade or two, demand for Angus cattle meeting the brand’s high standards had skyrocketed. Guaranteeing consumers a better product had united the family ranchers with food distributors, retailers and chefs in their efforts to bring great-tasting beef to the table.
The brand had shown everyone what beef could be. From their mutual focus on delivering top quality to the dinner plate, the brand’s promise had been made and kept, instilled in every pound of beef.
“I think the Certified Angus Beef ® brand was the first farm-to-table concept,” Hussman says. “We didn’t put a name to it, or connect all the dots and market it that way, but it truly was.”
And that’s exactly what the founding cattlemen envisioned: a brand of beef driven by passion and pride to ensure consumer satisfaction at the table while sustaining its value for the ranchers and food businesses supplying it.
