David’s Burgers Owner Wants to Sell ‘The Whole Cow’

David Bubbas, left, and his son Alan discuss expanding their popular hamburger business into the steak market. (Karen E. Segrave)

One of the things lost in the controversy over Alan Bubbus’ plans for a slaughterhouse in North Little Rock was the restaurateur’s endgame.

Bubbus, the owner of David’s Burgers, said his 10 burger restaurants use about 1 million pounds of hamburger meat a year. He is intent on improving the quality of the beef he sells, cutting costs, increasing efficiency and reducing risk. Building a slaughterhouse would help him achieve those goals.

It also would allow him to increase his steak sales, another of his goals. Bubbus sells steaks at his burger restaurants, online at davidsbeef.com and wholesale to other restaurants, currently averaging about $1 million in sales a year, he said. He’d like to grow that figure to $5 million or $6 million a year.

“If we can grow our steak sales, then we can sell the whole cow,” Bubbus said. “We want to bring in the cow, sell the premium cuts through davidsbeef.com or to restaurants locally and we also have a dry-aged product that’s a very high-end product.”

Ultimately, he said, “trying to compete with, like, Omaha Steaks, is where we’re heading,” referring to the Nebraska food company that sells steaks and other products directly to consumers.

To that end, Bubbus applied last year to the city of North Little Rock for a special use permit to operate a small-scale slaughterhouse at his property at 1600 Gregory St., where he currently processes beef for his restaurants and online and wholesale sales.

The initial application said 50 cattle would be slaughtered at the facility each week, although Bubbus later said that number would be closer to 20 to 25.

His plans drew fierce opposition from residents and property owners of the predominantly Black, low-income neighborhood, and last month, Bubbus withdrew his application.

The controversy resulted in state Rep. Tracy Steele, D-North Little Rock, introducing a bill last month in the state Legislature to prohibit new slaughterhouses in cities with 2,500 or more residents if the slaughterhouse would be 2 or fewer miles from a church, school or densely populated residential area.

In my interview with Bubbus, he said he was still looking for a good location for a slaughterhouse, one not far from his Gregory Street processing facility.

What started him on his journey to bring as much of the beef processing in-house as possible was the pandemic. “After COVID hit, it was clear to me that the supply chain is a real problem,” Bubbus said.

“Our business is built on beef,” he said, with the David’s Burgers restaurants projected to see about $25 million in gross sales this year. “It’s very concerning to me to depend on four gigantic corporations that supply 80% to 90% of the beef in this country.” Those four corporations are JBS Foods of Greeley, Colorado; Tyson Foods Inc. of Springdale; Cargill of Wayzata, Minnesota; and National Beef of Kansas City, Missouri.

“With the way we’re processing beef now,” Bubbus said, “we’re already really doing the hard part.” The beef comes to the facility in quarters, where it’s processed into meat for the restaurants and online and wholesale sales.

But having an on-site or nearby slaughterhouse would allow him to improve the quality of his beef, cut costs, increase efficiency “and also improve our risk tolerance with being more vertically integrated, being able to work with local cattle ranchers — it’s just a no-brainer decision to move forward with doing this,” he said.

He added: “If you look at it from a business owner’s perspective, it just about makes David’s Burgers riskless, unless there’s an apocalyptic event. I mean, under what circumstances are people not going to be buying hamburgers? If there’s a recession, our sales go up. If the economy does well, our sales go up.

“The only risk that we’ve had in our business that is material is the supply side and the rising cost of beef and the ability of those large corporations to operate like a monopoly together and price us out of the market.”

Most conversations with Bubbus eventually get around to his emphasis on the quality of the beef he sells. He criticizes the big beef producers for not hanging their beef as long as he does, saying that he hangs even his hamburger meat a week to “let it cure out.” Bubbus said he hangs his dry-aged beef for 21 to 28 days.

“The ability to have a relationship with a local cattle farmer and sell the whole cow to people in Arkansas — I mean, that is a really neat opportunity,” Bubbus said.