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Case Studies

Dakota Halal Processing Company - this case study looks at a Halal USDA Slaughter and Processing Plant in Harvey, ND. The plant was only open for a few years and it was never successful in creating revenue.

Summary bullets:

The processing plant was built and paid for by the Harvey Economic Development Corporation. Since the meat processing companies didn’t actually own the plant, they weren’t able to borrow against the building and instead had to make a $14,000 lease payment each month.
The business plan didn’t allow for enough start up cash to handle the unforeseen expenses that arose during start-up. The original business plan also envisioned producing a variety of value-added products and a large kitchen was built, but the kitchen needed to be modified because it didn’t meet USDA requirements (which ended up costing them a lot of money). The business plan didn’t take into consideration consumers’ demand for graded beef, and it would have taken $100,000 to bring in a USDA grader.
The plant never found a market for its offal or hides and ended up paying a rendering company to remove the waste.
According to the case study, the Dakota Halal Processing Company followed Halal requirements to the tee, but they may have been undercut by other companies that claim to be purely Halal but cut corners in order to reduce prices.
Distributors were hesitant to buy the products because they needed a guarantee that there would be a steady volume to meet customer demand.
There were personnel issues, like incompetent and unmovitated managers and staff. The quality of cutting and packaging wasn’t good, which damaged the company’s reputation with consumers.
The plant did not offer any retail.
The plant did not have effective sales and marketing staff.

Advice from Paul Kallenback, a rancher on the Central Dakota Cattle Association and Central Dakota Beef LLC boards:

“After this difficult, expensive experience, Paul believes they never should have tried to do their own slaughtering. They should have first bought beef for value-added processing, to build market share. Then they could have started custom slaughtering at a larger plant, shipping needed cuts back to their own plant for further processing and selling the excess to a custom facility. If they had done all that before they slaughtered one animal themselves, ‘we would have had a graded product, market share, marketing experience, quality control, and no inventory to support or monitor,’ he says, ‘and we wouldn’t have lost so much money.’”

This USDA ERS website also looks at a few meat processing facility case studies.

Other Resources

The Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network has a great overview and guide for beginner local meat processors. Here’s an outline that they put together about how to get started in the meat processing industry. They also have a Small Meat Processors Business Planning Guidebook

Information on certified organic: link

Iowa State University Extension and Outreach has several good resources:

Guide to Designing a Small Red Meat Plant (the PDF version is free and can be downloaded from this link)
Iowa Meat Processors’ Resource Guidebook - this guidebook covers building, upgrading, or expanding a meat processing facility (in Iowa). The free PDF version can be downloaded here.
- The guidebook outlines these steps: business planning and feasibility; plant design; financing; permitting and inspection; SOPs, SSOPs and HACCP; and labor.

Here’s a story in the New York Times about a family-owned, custom exempt, Halal goat meat processing facility in Texas. They process 6,000 to 7,000 animals per year.

Here are links to potential grant and loan sources:

USDA Grants/Loans

FSIS Grants/Loans

MDA Grants/Loans

Authors and Contact Information

This page was developed by a graduate student team from the Masters of Development Practice (MDP) program at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. The team included the following members

Olaoluwakitan Babalola , MDP 2022
Casey Ortbahn, MDP 2022
Sam Turner, MDP 2022
Dave Wilsey, Ph.D. Project Advisor & MDP Program Director dwilsey@umn.edu

This project was also supported by University of Extension's Regional Sustainable Development Partnership (RSDP), Central Region.

Molly Zins, Executive Director zend0007@umn.edu

And University of Minnesota Extension:

Serdar Mamedov, Extension Educator- Health & Nutrition smamedoc@umn.edu

The team also put together a list of stakeholders for the goat meat market. The stakeholder list can be accessed using this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S1ArlRLQkIsjvl2AFnx4piRgF6jsIUorW_u_JV6DV2c/edit#gid=1376648272

Goat data and population data was collected during the summer of 2021 by a team of graduate students from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The google sheet containing this data can be accessed using the following link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xb8MlidJ28ZGMshuFFyA2Xd381zXAGLrBGeK_OS0nCw/edit#gid=1570125784

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Case Studies

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Authors and Contact Information