Steven McBee Jr., 33, built McBee Farm & Cattle Co. around a 2023 purchase that pushed the business beyond raising cattle and into processing and shipping its own product. The move matters because the family is trying to keep more of the value that used to disappear once cattle left the farm.
“Everybody in this industry gets told to raise your cattle, sell them into the commodity system and take the price you’re given,” McBee said. “Why stop there? If we wanted more control over our future, we had to own more of what came next.”
McBee Farm in Gallatin
The family’s path started in 2017, when he had already been circling the idea for a snack stick. The first brand launched in 2020, and a production facility followed two years later, turning a cattle operation in Gallatin, Missouri, into a consumer business with a branded product line instead of a single sale point.
By 2023, McBee Farm & Cattle Co. bought its own meat processing plant. After months of upgrades, the plant earned federal inspection and SQF certification, which let the company move from custom processing toward a tighter, more controlled operation. A fulfillment center built on the farm means every order now ships from the same place the cattle are raised.
Steve Sr. and three brothers
McBee works alongside his father, Steve Sr., and his brothers Jesse, Cole and Brayden, so the operation is still built around a family labor structure rather than a distant corporate chain. That matters in a business where the four largest beef packers controlled about a quarter of the U.S. market in the early 1970s and now handle roughly 85 percent of U.S. beef processing.
“We built the ladder one rung at a time, and each step was funded by the one before it,” McBee said. The company’s sequence — brand first, then production, then a plant, then fulfillment — shows a deliberate way to finance growth without waiting for the commodity system to hand back more margin.
Small and midsize processors
Washington is investing up to $500 million to strengthen small and midsize meat processors, a signal that the bottleneck McBee moved into is now getting federal attention. His family’s model is already operating in that space, which puts pressure on other ranchers to think beyond selling cattle and into how product gets made, packaged and sent out.
McBee also said, “We had to become beginners over and over” and “There wasn’t a shortcut. Every new part of the business came with a learning curve of its own.” That is the part worth watching: the company is building control and scale, but it has done it through equipment failures and expensive lessons, not a smooth climb, and the business has not explained how profitable the snack-stick and processing strategy has been.
