Here?s Why Fryar Crossed the Road

Ozark Mountain Poultry Inc. cofounder Ed Fryar said his company is a small fish in a big pond. With the front office expertise OMP has, look for a mighty big splash in the industry.

There is a very dark side to OMP, a company that opened April 2 in Rogers. It will specialize in deboning dark meat from chickens, similar to the idea that Fryar and others had in 1994 when they founded Twin Rivers Group in Fayetteville.

Fryar resigned as Twin Rivers’ CEO May 29, 2000, ending what had been a fruitful partnership. Twin Rivers became the first poultry processor ever to make Inc. magazine’s prestigious top 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing companies in 1999, weighing in at No. 89.

It was the only Arkansas firm on the list.

“There was a difference of opinion on the direction [Twin Rivers] should take,” Fryar said. “I wanted to go one way and the other three wanted to go another, so we split the sheets.”

Fryar is on the same page with OMP partners Howard Otwell and Scott and Tanya Hammock. The new group plans to start with what Fryar calls “a pretty aggressive schedule.”

He said OMP got into production for a little less than $2 million and plans to reach somewhere between $10 million and $15 million in gross revenue its first year.

OMP, located in the former Lemke Foods facility on the corner of Eighth Street and Easy Avenue in Rogers, is on about 14 acres that allow plenty of room for growth. Only about four acres are currently being used by the firm.

The company, with 40 employees, is currently targeting the Asian and Hispanic restaurant markets, providing boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Fryar hopes to be deboning about 300,000 pounds of dark meat per week by the end of 2001. It’s running at about a fourth of that currently.

OMP uses individual carriers to transport its product.

Target Markets

Dark meat’s market price has fluctuated in the last four years anywhere from 60 cents to $1.10 per pound. Currently, it’s just below 90 cents.

The industry produced about 15 billion pounds of chicken leg meat — leg quarters, legs, thighs, drums and deboned thigh meat — in 1999, with 11.2 billion of that staying in the U.S.

The meat industry has been suffering with a surplus, but that’s precisely why Fryar felt like the timing was right for OMP to join the field.

“It’s perfect timing because right now just about every chicken company is trying to develop more dark meat products,” he said.

When the Soviet Union’s economy collapsed, Russia and Eastern Europe needed a safe and inexpensive supply of meat for protein that was also tasty. It was just the break the U.S. dark meat market needed, as its product fit the bill and the surplus could exported. China also prefers dark meat. While that export sector is still improving, production has outgrown itself once again, and another surplus of dark meat has arisen.

“Dark meat has been a burden in the industry,” Fryar said. “The reason the market is saturated right now is because you’re not going to find another Russia anywhere in the world, so we have to find at home more of a market for dark meat. And Americans will eat dark meat if it’s cooked in chili, chicken enchiladas, sweet and sour chicken, etc. The poultry industry has a drive to find additional domestic markets for dark meat.”

Changing Perceptions

The United States might be trying to change consumers’ perception of the dark meat product, but Tom Cosgrove, editor of Poultry magazine, said the change will be a slow one. And the poultry industry has no one to blame but itself.

“Dark meat holds flavor better than white meat,” Cosgrove said. “The American consumer prefers breast meat. Why? If you make chicken cacciatore it’s gonna taste better with dark meat. Breast meat dries out … what could be more bland? Just go for the dark meat. It’s kind of interesting that the rest of the world prefers dark meat and we don’t.

“Dark meat — for a number reasons — has the status of a second-tier product. And a lot of the reason goes back to the way the poultry industry has mismanaged its marketing effort. The industry has heavily promoted white meat products and has neglected dark meat. This is evident even today when you go to your grocery store and the so-called value-added products will generally feature white meat. If you want to see dark meat it’s gonna be in some Styrofoam. It’s like, ‘Here is our bulk commodity product over here. Over here in our nice packaging are our value-added white meat products.’ The industry is beginning to respond, but it still perceives dark meat to be an export item. That’s a mindset.”

Bird Brains

A chicken comprises almost equal parts of white and dark meat. Studies show about 48 percent of a chicken is dark meat. For turkeys, that figure drops to about 30 percent. And with the United States being a white meat market, the breast will typically sell three times that of the dark portion.

Tyson Foods Inc. of Springdale is the world’s largest poultry firm. Sue Quillen, Tyson’s vice president of retail marketing, said her firm and the industry as a whole face a fight against something they caused.

“As an industry we’ve done a terrific job promoting skinless, boneless breasts, and we’ve done a very poor job on leg meat, so we have to fight our own years of promoting the white meat side,” Quillen told Poultry magazine.

Dick Lobb, director of communications for the National Chicken Council, said the problem is not that “dark meat is unpopular, it’s just that white meat has lapped the field.”

But Fryar believes the industry can and will handle the vast imbalance in white and dark meat sales.

“Most companies produce birds today for their white meat,” Fryar said. “The poultry industry is probably one of the best success stories in U.S. agriculture today because about 40 or 50 years ago it took four to five pounds of feed to produce one pound of meat per bird,” Fryar said.

“Today, that’s down to about one and three-quarters pound of feed. And that’s just one example of the tremendous increase in efficient results the industry has made. They’ve done it in genetics, nutrition, fighting disease, housing … every single aspect of the industry has gotten better and better and better.”