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Over the last
three years, some four hundred small meat processors have gone out of
business. Hundreds of others
preceded them during the last decade. This
family decided they were going to stay in the meat business and found ways
to do it.
 This village of
forty or so people recently received highway signs acknowledging that the
place even exists. Slowing down
to the posted 45 miles per hour speed limit, it still takes but 30 seconds
to pass through town. Located on
a state highway, Swiss,
Missouri
is located in a rural area two hours driving time away from the nearest
major city. The closest town, 12
miles away, has a population of 2500 and has it’s own meat processors.
The next community of any size has a
Wal-Mart
Super
Center
with a wide variety of meat products. With
farm consolidation and the size of the remaining farm families growing
smaller, the customer base around Swiss rapidly disappeared in the seventies
and eighties. It would have been
easy for the Sloan family to give up and move to the city to find work like
so many of their neighbors had done. Not
this family.
When Mike Sloan
graduated from high school in 1976, he knew that he wanted to make his
career in the meat business and he also knew that he wanted to stay in
Swiss. He also knew that the
customer base was going away for the locker/freezer plant business that his
dad had operated since 1965 as the Swiss Country Store and Service Station.
Mike knew that he had to have a plan for survival and a plan for the
future.
 Fortunately,
Mike’s dad, Bill Sloan, had already begun some diversification. He began
making German Country Sausages to sell over his retail counter and to area
restaurants and grocery stores. As
the business grew, he realized the need to expand in order to keep up with
the demand for his sausages. The
Swiss Meat & Sausage Company retail store was built in October 1969.
Bill was able to
increase his processing volume of beef, hogs and lamb for custom orders, as
well as sell USDA inspected naturally-fed and aged sides and quarters of
beef, hogs, and lamb. He also
added a smokehouse to keep up with the sausage demand and started production
of hickory-smoked hams, bacons and turkeys.
The size of the operation was doubled in 1974 with the addition of
more cooler space, a larger retail area and two more smokehouses.
 Another move
towards diversification happened when Swiss Meat & Sausage Company
started supplying meat products for weddings, anniversaries and other
parties. Mike’s mother was not
satisfied, however, with the other food supplied by caterers to the various
functions. She decided she could
produce better quality salads at a more reasonable price.
So, with Dad manufacturing the German sausages, hams, roast beef,
smoked whole hogs, turkey and chicken, Mother provided the salads, desserts
and drinks and a successful catering business was begun in 1976.
When Mike
graduated from high school, he already had the beginnings of a plan in mind.
To expand the business he started producing and selling fresh pork
products to area restaurants and grocery stores.
The profits from the pork sales allowed Mike to begin planning for
the future and putting his plans into action.
He purchased newer equipment with the pork money and worked to
improve the cured products even more. Mike
Sloan was really thinking about the future as he pondered over where the
business would be in ten to twenty years.
Having started in the business as a child, he also remembered that
his dad always said that the most important thing was the quality of the
product.
When he was
satisfied that the products were of the highest quality, he started selling
the sausages and other cured products, gradually cutting back on the fresh
pork products. Mike realized
that specialty sausages and other cured specialty products were the future
of the business.
As the business
continued to expand, Mike made sure that 100% of the available space in the
meat plant was being utilized in a productive matter.
Today, Mike says “We’ve grown so much that I think we’re
utilizing about 125% of our available space.”
 Mike continued to
promote the various sausages and cured meat products.
He entered state association contests, Missouri State Fair
competitions, some county fairs and a large annual sausage festival held in
Hermann, Missouri
that draws thousands of visitors from
St. Louis
and other communities. While at
the state fair and sausage festival events, Mike and his family prepared
samples of their product, distributed literature promoting the product and
sold packages of those products to people from all over the state.
His family
includes his wife, Lynette, who also works full-time in the business.
When they first began to date, Mike said they had stopped by a store
where he was checking the color and quality of competing meat products.
Lynette asked him what he was doing and he explained what he was
looking for. Two weeks later
they were in the same store and Mike spotted Lynette by the meat case.
“What are you doing?” Mike asked. “I’m
checking the color of the meat” Lynette replied.
The rest is marital history.
Lynette is now
very much involved in yet another part of the business that has proved to be
successful. She has designed and
is involved in the packaging and marketing of holiday gift baskets that
include, of course, sausage products and other cured meat products.
This past holiday season, in addition to the regular literature that
had been distributed, a Swiss Meat & Sausage Co. radio commercial
including the company’s toll-free number was played twenty times during
the first two weeks of December on the number one rated
St. Louis
radio station. Mike says they
were unable to listen to the radio for the commercials inside the plant due
to interference from the equipment, but they knew when the commercials
played because the “phones just started ringing and ringing for half an
hour each time it played.”
 Swiss is not a
tourist destination. However,
tour busses do pass through Swiss on their way to Missouri
tourist attractions. Mike Sloan
decided they might as well stop in Swiss, so he contracted with one tour
operator that runs two buses together to stop at the Swiss Meat &
Sausage Co. for lunch. The 90 or
so visitors get a “nickel” tour of the plant, a delicious lunch (which
includes sausage products, of course) and an opportunity to browse through
the retail store. Mike says that
each of the visitors spends an average 18 to 25 dollars on his products.
Over the years,
Mike has expanded the sausage line which now features 32 varieties of
sausages. Most of these flavors
have won awards at the various competitions he enters, and he proudly
displays the awards he has accumulated in the retail store.
Each time he wins a new award, it’s posted on a portable sign he
has placed near the entrance to their parking lot.
 This year, the
plant is being expanded again with a 6,000 sq. ft. addition to increase
production capabilities. Being
added is warehouse space, a packaging room, a sausage aging room and more
cooler space. There will be a
new sausage kitchen, three more smokehouses and an upgrade of equipment to
remain competitive and to further diversify operations.
The parking lot has already been enlarged to handle busses and motor
homes, as well as the increasing amount of automobile traffic.
The old service station in front of the store is long gone and the
entrance to the parking lot is being enlarged.
It will be decorated with a split rail fence and appropriate
plantings for a park-like setting.
Mike Sloan says
that the company really can be broken down into nine different operations.
They include (1) custom processing for farmers and ranchers, (2)
retail sales, (3) wholesale, (4) state and national champion smoked meats,
(5) catering, (6) mail order, (7) private labeling, (8) deer season
processing, (9) exotic meats including bison, elk, ostrich, emus and
venison. They currently
are studying the possibility of adding a line of prepared foods.
Thanks to
Mike’s continued promotions through mailings, radio commercials, road
signs, attendance at festivals, television and newspaper exposure,
distribution of literature in tourist areas and old fashioned selling, it is
estimated that the customer base extends out to a 150 mile circle around
Swiss.
 This continues to
be a family business. Mike’s dad still works in the business full-time as well as two sisters who work
full-time and another two who work part-time.
He also has a full-time niece, one part-time nephew and a full-time
first cousin “to go along with my full-time wife,” says Sloan.
Mike Sloan sums
up the philosophy that has enabled him to expand a small family business
into what it is today in this way, “I’m real excited about the industry.
I know some people are down about HACCP and the other new
regulations, but I try to take these and turn them into a positive.
I try to take a negative and turn it into a positive in all parts of
the business. It’s the
positive attitude that keeps me going.”
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