Overloaded Interior Alaska meat processor rocked by widespread complaints
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FAIRBANKS — After Travis Marsh shot his first moose back in September, a nice 52-inch bull near Delta Junction, he couldn’t have been happier. The thought of having a full freezer of tasty, high-protein meat made his mouth water.
Marsh, of Wasilla, and his hunting partner, Justin Morgan of Fairbanks, took the moose to Tanana Valley Meats, a USDA-certified slaughterhouse and meat processing plant off the Richardson Highway between Fairbanks and North Pole. Morgan knew the plant had just opened, it was USDA-certified and he had read a couple of good reviews about it on the Internet.
But Marsh and Morgan were left with a bad taste in their mouths after waiting almost two months to get their meat back, and they say it was rancid. Not to mention the fact that Marsh dropped off 421 pounds of meat to be processed and got back less than 200 pounds.
“I took very good care of my meat,” Marsh said. “I spent three days taking care of this meat in the field, waking up in the middle of the night to turn it because it was warm out.
“I was proud to get my first moose, and now it doesn’t even taste good,” he said. “I was ready to cry about it. I’m really pissed off.”
He isn’t the only one.
Alaska State Troopers in Fairbanks received numerous complaints from hunters who took their moose, caribou and sheep meat to Tanana Valley Meats to be processed, said Sgt. Scott Quist with Alaska Wildlife Troopers in Fairbanks.
“We talked to the (Department of Environmental Conservation) about it at length about a month ago, and we recently got a new rash of complaints about people getting rotten meat back or no meat back at all,” said Quist.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation visited the plant on two occasions in response to complaints, one from troopers and one from a customer, but didn’t issue any citations.
“We went out and did a pretty extensive
investigation to the extent that any (game meat) products may have impacted products in the part of plant we regulate,” said Lorinda Lhotka, an environmental health officer with DEC in Fairbanks. “We had to work with them on some storage issues and notified the USDA of those issues.”
No oversight
While the slaughtering of domestic livestock is highly regulated by the DEC and USDA, wild game meat processing doesn’t fall under the authority of any state or federal agency.
The state’s wanton waste law applies to hunters who salvage meat from animals, not processors who cut it up, Quist said.
The DEC regulates sanitary conditions in relation to how commercial meat is stored and sold.
“We don’t have clear regulatory authorities to regulate custom processing for game submitted by hunters,” said Ron Klein, food safety and sanitation program manager for the DEC in Anchorage. “There is no agency that does that. It really is a gray area.”
With game animals, nobody except the hunter has any control how an animal is butchered or handled in the field, he said.
“Those issues make it difficult for us to regulate game meat processing,” he said. “Whether the state should be doing that or not is a policy decision for public or the legislature to make.”
The USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service oversees the slaughtering and processing of animals at processing plants, but it does not have jurisdiction over wild game unless it’s affecting the facility’s USDA requirements, said Mark Aherns with the USDA in Anchorage. Aherns would not confirm or deny the USDA had received any complaints about Tanana Valley Meats.
Troopers, meanwhile, are conferring with the attorney general’s office to determine whether any charges will be filed, Quist said.
Too much moose
Tanana Valley Meats manager and head meatcutter Stacy Hansen, as well as plant president Scott Miller, acknowledge mistakes were made in the plant’s game processing this fall, and Miller said he is “trying to make it right” with dissatisfied customers.
The problem, both men said, was that the plant got overwhelmed with moose in September and didn’t have enough meatcutters to deal with it.
Hansen doesn’t know how many moose they took in but figures it was more than 200. Hunting season ended two months ago, but the plant still has 60 to 70 moose to process. The moose are frozen in refrigerator vans outside the plant.
“I know we have unhappy people,” Miller said. “How can you not have unhappy people when you tell people it’s going to be three or four weeks before they get their meat back and it’s two months?”
Miller said he has a list of about a half-dozen customers who have called to complain about how long it took to process their meat or the bad-tasting meat. One of the complainants is threatening a civil suit against the Tanana Valley Meats because he and his hunting partners took in 315 pounds of moose meat to get ground up and it all came back bad.
In that case, Miller said he offered to replace the hunter’s 315 pounds of moose with beef, a trade the hunter seemed receptive to but had not agreed to as of Friday. In other cases, the plant has reduced processing fees or offered full refunds, he said.
“It depends on the complaint,” Miller said. “For the most part, people have been nice about it. People don’t seem to want to drive us out of business or bankrupt us.”
Tanana Valley Meats has gone through a tumultuous few years. Started as
B-Y Farms in 1989, the plant was purchased by a group of local investors in 2007 when the original owners, Bob and Yvonne Franklin, went out of business.
The slaughterhouse operated without a USDA certificate for nearly two years, doing custom processing, before finally regaining its USDA certification in June.
“Our main focus with this business is quality control and customer service,” Miller said at the time.
Angry customers
After taking some meat to be processed at Tanana Valley Meats two years ago and liking what he got back, Jake Horazdovsky decided to take 80 pounds of trimmed moose meat in to get made into sausage when he got a moose in early September.
This time, though, the results weren’t the same. Horazdovsky didn’t get his meat back until late October, and he claims it was rotten.
“It’s rank,” he said, unwrapping a package for a reporter to sniff in his apartment off Farmer’s Loop. “I cooked it and it’s so bad.”
Horazdovsky, who called the Department of Fish and Game and troopers to complain, is the only person who personally brought meat back to him claiming it was bad, Hansen said.
The way Horazdovsky tells it, Hansen admitted the meat was bad. He told Hansen he wanted his money back plus $2 per pound for the meat he brought in, at which point Hansen “came unglued.”
Hansen’s side of it is that he acknowledged the meat was bad and Horazdovsky then became “unruly” and wanted “an ungodly amount” of money. Hansen said he offered to give Horazdovsky his money back.
Horazdovsky didn’t get any money and he still has his rotten meat sitting in a friend’s freezer.
“I have a hard time throwing all this away,” he said. “You shoot a moose; you eat it.”
After waiting three weeks for his meat, Marsh said he called Tanana Valley Meats and was told it would be another two or three weeks before it was done. He sent Morgan out to pick up the meat to take some place else.
When Morgan arrived, he said nobody could find their meat. He started poking around in the refrigerator vans himself and was appalled by what he discovered.”
“It was piles of meat on top of piles of meat,” he said. “It was in refrigerator vans, but the doors were open. It was filth. That’s not how you deal with meat.”
Morgan took some pictures on his iPhone until Hansen grabbed it away from him. Hansen then threatened to call troopers and kicked him off the property, Morgan said.
Morgan called Miller and another plant owner to express his displeasure. Then he called Alaska State Troopers, who told him that game meat processing does not fall under the state’s wanton waste law and is not under troopers’ jurisdiction. DEC told him the same thing.
“That’s the story I got from everybody,” Morgan said. “Everybody saw these pictures and there wasn’t a damn thing done about it.”
He and Morgan talked about taking some of the moose they kept and the meat they got back from Tanana Valley Meats to have it DNA tested to see if it’s the same meat, but didn’t see what good it would do at this point.
As for what he plans to do with the meat of the the first moose he shot, Marsh said, “I’m going to give it to a dog musher.”
Differing views
One factor in the equation, according to Hansen, is that hunters don’t always take as good a care of their meat as they might think they do.
“If these folks shoot a very large moose and do not get it out of the field in timely fashion and don’t get it to us to get cooled properly there starts to be bone sour going on,” the meatcutter said. “If you drop an inch cube piece of bone sour meat into a 200-pound batch of meat, the whole batch is going to go bad.”
Marsh and Horazdovsky claim they took excellent care of the animals they killed and the meat was perfectly fine when they dropped it off in person.
Hansen countered, “Every hunter says that.”
Some hunters — Hansen didn’t recall their names — dropped moose off before the plant opened and left them lying on the loading dock for hours, Hansen said.
“I would come into work and I would find up to five moose laying on our dock that were turned in at 3, 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “I’d come in and find animals lying at the back door.”
Asked why he didn’t turn the meat away and tell hunters to come pick it up, Hansen said he had to move it anyway to get into the plant, and the only place to move it was into refrigerator vans.
As for the stories and photos on the Internet that show open refrigerator vans with piles of moose quarters piled on top of each other, Hansen said “everybody’s got their own side to the story.”
In hindsight, Hansen and Miller said the plant should have stopped taking in moose at some point. Hansen said he should have inspected each animal more thoroughly to ensure it was in good condition and had more experienced help on hand.
From Miller’s point of view, the situation that unfolded at Tanana Valley Meats was a result not being able to say no. It also is evidence of how badly Fairbanks needs a meat processing plant, he said.
“It looks to me like the mistake we made is we were too nice and people took advantage of us,” Miller said. “This whole thing backs up the point of how huge the demand is for a meat processing plant in North Pole.”
Next year, Tanana Valley Meats won’t make the same mistake, Miller said.
“If I’m still president and Tanana Valley Meats is still open and still in existence, I can’t tell you we’ll process another pound of game meat,” Miller said. “I keep pinching myself, hoping this nightmare will be over.”
Contact staff writer Tim Mowry at 459-7587.
Marsh, of Wasilla, and his hunting partner, Justin Morgan of Fairbanks, took the moose to Tanana Valley Meats, a USDA-certified slaughterhouse and meat processing plant off the Richardson Highway between Fairbanks and North Pole. Morgan knew the plant had just opened, it was USDA-certified and he had read a couple of good reviews about it on the Internet.
But Marsh and Morgan were left with a bad taste in their mouths after waiting almost two months to get their meat back, and they say it was rancid. Not to mention the fact that Marsh dropped off 421 pounds of meat to be processed and got back less than 200 pounds.
“I took very good care of my meat,” Marsh said. “I spent three days taking care of this meat in the field, waking up in the middle of the night to turn it because it was warm out.
“I was proud to get my first moose, and now it doesn’t even taste good,” he said. “I was ready to cry about it. I’m really pissed off.”
He isn’t the only one.
Alaska State Troopers in Fairbanks received numerous complaints from hunters who took their moose, caribou and sheep meat to Tanana Valley Meats to be processed, said Sgt. Scott Quist with Alaska Wildlife Troopers in Fairbanks.
“We talked to the (Department of Environmental Conservation) about it at length about a month ago, and we recently got a new rash of complaints about people getting rotten meat back or no meat back at all,” said Quist.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation visited the plant on two occasions in response to complaints, one from troopers and one from a customer, but didn’t issue any citations.
“We went out and did a pretty extensive
investigation to the extent that any (game meat) products may have impacted products in the part of plant we regulate,” said Lorinda Lhotka, an environmental health officer with DEC in Fairbanks. “We had to work with them on some storage issues and notified the USDA of those issues.”
No oversight
While the slaughtering of domestic livestock is highly regulated by the DEC and USDA, wild game meat processing doesn’t fall under the authority of any state or federal agency.
The state’s wanton waste law applies to hunters who salvage meat from animals, not processors who cut it up, Quist said.
The DEC regulates sanitary conditions in relation to how commercial meat is stored and sold.
“We don’t have clear regulatory authorities to regulate custom processing for game submitted by hunters,” said Ron Klein, food safety and sanitation program manager for the DEC in Anchorage. “There is no agency that does that. It really is a gray area.”
With game animals, nobody except the hunter has any control how an animal is butchered or handled in the field, he said.
“Those issues make it difficult for us to regulate game meat processing,” he said. “Whether the state should be doing that or not is a policy decision for public or the legislature to make.”
The USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service oversees the slaughtering and processing of animals at processing plants, but it does not have jurisdiction over wild game unless it’s affecting the facility’s USDA requirements, said Mark Aherns with the USDA in Anchorage. Aherns would not confirm or deny the USDA had received any complaints about Tanana Valley Meats.
Troopers, meanwhile, are conferring with the attorney general’s office to determine whether any charges will be filed, Quist said.
Too much moose
Tanana Valley Meats manager and head meatcutter Stacy Hansen, as well as plant president Scott Miller, acknowledge mistakes were made in the plant’s game processing this fall, and Miller said he is “trying to make it right” with dissatisfied customers.
The problem, both men said, was that the plant got overwhelmed with moose in September and didn’t have enough meatcutters to deal with it.
Hansen doesn’t know how many moose they took in but figures it was more than 200. Hunting season ended two months ago, but the plant still has 60 to 70 moose to process. The moose are frozen in refrigerator vans outside the plant.
“I know we have unhappy people,” Miller said. “How can you not have unhappy people when you tell people it’s going to be three or four weeks before they get their meat back and it’s two months?”
Miller said he has a list of about a half-dozen customers who have called to complain about how long it took to process their meat or the bad-tasting meat. One of the complainants is threatening a civil suit against the Tanana Valley Meats because he and his hunting partners took in 315 pounds of moose meat to get ground up and it all came back bad.
In that case, Miller said he offered to replace the hunter’s 315 pounds of moose with beef, a trade the hunter seemed receptive to but had not agreed to as of Friday. In other cases, the plant has reduced processing fees or offered full refunds, he said.
“It depends on the complaint,” Miller said. “For the most part, people have been nice about it. People don’t seem to want to drive us out of business or bankrupt us.”
Tanana Valley Meats has gone through a tumultuous few years. Started as
B-Y Farms in 1989, the plant was purchased by a group of local investors in 2007 when the original owners, Bob and Yvonne Franklin, went out of business.
The slaughterhouse operated without a USDA certificate for nearly two years, doing custom processing, before finally regaining its USDA certification in June.
“Our main focus with this business is quality control and customer service,” Miller said at the time.
Angry customers
After taking some meat to be processed at Tanana Valley Meats two years ago and liking what he got back, Jake Horazdovsky decided to take 80 pounds of trimmed moose meat in to get made into sausage when he got a moose in early September.
This time, though, the results weren’t the same. Horazdovsky didn’t get his meat back until late October, and he claims it was rotten.
“It’s rank,” he said, unwrapping a package for a reporter to sniff in his apartment off Farmer’s Loop. “I cooked it and it’s so bad.”
Horazdovsky, who called the Department of Fish and Game and troopers to complain, is the only person who personally brought meat back to him claiming it was bad, Hansen said.
The way Horazdovsky tells it, Hansen admitted the meat was bad. He told Hansen he wanted his money back plus $2 per pound for the meat he brought in, at which point Hansen “came unglued.”
Hansen’s side of it is that he acknowledged the meat was bad and Horazdovsky then became “unruly” and wanted “an ungodly amount” of money. Hansen said he offered to give Horazdovsky his money back.
Horazdovsky didn’t get any money and he still has his rotten meat sitting in a friend’s freezer.
“I have a hard time throwing all this away,” he said. “You shoot a moose; you eat it.”
After waiting three weeks for his meat, Marsh said he called Tanana Valley Meats and was told it would be another two or three weeks before it was done. He sent Morgan out to pick up the meat to take some place else.
When Morgan arrived, he said nobody could find their meat. He started poking around in the refrigerator vans himself and was appalled by what he discovered.”
“It was piles of meat on top of piles of meat,” he said. “It was in refrigerator vans, but the doors were open. It was filth. That’s not how you deal with meat.”
Morgan took some pictures on his iPhone until Hansen grabbed it away from him. Hansen then threatened to call troopers and kicked him off the property, Morgan said.
Morgan called Miller and another plant owner to express his displeasure. Then he called Alaska State Troopers, who told him that game meat processing does not fall under the state’s wanton waste law and is not under troopers’ jurisdiction. DEC told him the same thing.
“That’s the story I got from everybody,” Morgan said. “Everybody saw these pictures and there wasn’t a damn thing done about it.”
He and Morgan talked about taking some of the moose they kept and the meat they got back from Tanana Valley Meats to have it DNA tested to see if it’s the same meat, but didn’t see what good it would do at this point.
As for what he plans to do with the meat of the the first moose he shot, Marsh said, “I’m going to give it to a dog musher.”
Differing views
One factor in the equation, according to Hansen, is that hunters don’t always take as good a care of their meat as they might think they do.
“If these folks shoot a very large moose and do not get it out of the field in timely fashion and don’t get it to us to get cooled properly there starts to be bone sour going on,” the meatcutter said. “If you drop an inch cube piece of bone sour meat into a 200-pound batch of meat, the whole batch is going to go bad.”
Marsh and Horazdovsky claim they took excellent care of the animals they killed and the meat was perfectly fine when they dropped it off in person.
Hansen countered, “Every hunter says that.”
Some hunters — Hansen didn’t recall their names — dropped moose off before the plant opened and left them lying on the loading dock for hours, Hansen said.
“I would come into work and I would find up to five moose laying on our dock that were turned in at 3, 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “I’d come in and find animals lying at the back door.”
Asked why he didn’t turn the meat away and tell hunters to come pick it up, Hansen said he had to move it anyway to get into the plant, and the only place to move it was into refrigerator vans.
As for the stories and photos on the Internet that show open refrigerator vans with piles of moose quarters piled on top of each other, Hansen said “everybody’s got their own side to the story.”
In hindsight, Hansen and Miller said the plant should have stopped taking in moose at some point. Hansen said he should have inspected each animal more thoroughly to ensure it was in good condition and had more experienced help on hand.
From Miller’s point of view, the situation that unfolded at Tanana Valley Meats was a result not being able to say no. It also is evidence of how badly Fairbanks needs a meat processing plant, he said.
“It looks to me like the mistake we made is we were too nice and people took advantage of us,” Miller said. “This whole thing backs up the point of how huge the demand is for a meat processing plant in North Pole.”
Next year, Tanana Valley Meats won’t make the same mistake, Miller said.
“If I’m still president and Tanana Valley Meats is still open and still in existence, I can’t tell you we’ll process another pound of game meat,” Miller said. “I keep pinching myself, hoping this nightmare will be over.”
Contact staff writer Tim Mowry at 459-7587.
I am not surprised about this story. TVM has been stealing from people for a long time. I know I have learned the hard way. It was a long hunting season of just rain and we shot one on the last day and got it to TVM within 4 hours of killing it. They took it and of course I should have known better when there was 4 people in front of me handing in moose and they never labeled anything.
I think this might just shut down TVM. I say if you you like your meat done right go around and ask some butchers that work at safeway or freds and see if they do it at home. You will be shocked on who does it out of there house. The guy I have been using is cheap and is the manager at the old safeway in the meat department. He is great and he is fast. In the last 3 years my hunting partner and for the first time this year my wife shot one we have taken 7 moose to him in 3 years. It has never taken more then 3 days to get it back. He is a great guy and uses the plastic trays to hold the meat and everything.
So don't waste your time on TVM because they will rip you off and not care. Its just a job to them and they could care less. I have seen them cut a hair off a moose leg one time. There was one hair on the outside of the leg and he took about a 3 pound chunk off the leg because of the 1 hair. Hmmm why do they do that well if you know anything about them they also charge you for clean up so why not add the bill up.
That said, there've been irresponsible parties handling game meat in this town for as long as I can remember.
Before TVM existed, B-Y Farms was notorious for telling persons who 'lost' meat in their business that the meat was "bone-soured"; even when the meat in question was a portion of an animal, and the other portions were handled by other parties days later, and in excellent shape.
I witnessed numerous example of this, including a fellow 'losing' half of a decent sized bison.
A neighbor reported taking three double-shovel bull caribou to B-Y Farms, (his, & two hunting partners'), and received a TOTAL of 225 lbs. of meat.
Another received numerous packages of moose ribs, and complained that the meat wasn't his. He was told, "Sure it is," right up 'til he informed the persons there he'd stripped his ribs in the field.
The fact was (and I witnesed this) they were using old, broken-down compressors on their refrigerator units. Water was seeping out of refrigerator trailers that were aupposedly frozen.
I over-heard a conversation between a refrigerator repairman and a B-Y Farms employee that went like this;
"What's wrong with it?"
"Same thing that was wrong with it the last time you called me out here; you need a new compressor."
If TVMs was/is using the same equipment/refrigerator trailers that B-Y Farms used, then there's likely some of the same problems still plaguing the place.
Fortunately, 99.9% of my family's meat is cut by a fellow in the Mat-Su Valley who's been doing our meat for nearly 20 years, who only cuts meat when the owner's present to wrap it, who has over four decades of professional butcher experience, and who charges less than half the going rate per hanging lb.
Unfortunately for the readers, he quit taking new customers a couple of years ago, and few persons will travel to get meat done properly. He's got more repeat business than he needs.
Good, clean, honest buesiness will do that for a person.
i have no sympothy they need to be charged. And please any One with any smarts would stay away from this company.
To those that call folks like myself with jobs and no one to take care of this at home lazy I say butt out. I do not cut meat for a living and I contribute to the local economy by having a professional do this work.
I have cut my own meat in the past and think cutting your own is a good idea and an excellent way to save money. And once I retire or have more time on my hands will do so again.
Pat
When I heard that they were reinventing themselves from BY, I was hopefull that they had cleaned up their act. I know others were hopefull too, I'm not sure people will be optimistic though next time. This will probably mean the end for TVM.
I hope that this is all an accurate portrayal of TVM, and not just the case of a few unhappy individuals making a lot of trouble. There has been a lot of hard work in the last year done to get the much needed facility up and running again. What a shame, game meat or domestic meat is far too valuable to waste.
Does anyone know how to find the pictures online that the article refers to?
This goes for the hunters, transporters, guides, processors and even the family/friends that receive meat that don't know what to do with it.
I once salvaged two moose hind quarters that still had the hide on them from a rural dump that outside hunters threw away because it had fly blow on the cut portions. The meat was still good. Troopers wouldn't make a case because of the blow, and the smell. Gave one away to someone who didn't get a moose and ended up with about 80 pounds of extra meat to make into sausage that year...
This is the biggest slam on a local business since the World Plus fiasco. It helps us all when the facts come out in the open.