How Long Are Omaha Steaks Good For

The Untold Truth Of Omaha Steaks

Omaha Steaks has built a huge reputation for itself as one of the predominant post-delivery meat companies in the United States. The company prides itself on providing Americans all across the nation with quality, Midwestern beefiness — non only that, just they've got a wide selection of other meat products, snacks, and fifty-fifty some fancy schmancy wines.

Having begun as a small mom-and-pop butcher shop in its namesake town, Omaha Steaks has since grown into a major meatpacking powerhouse, delivering steaks and other goods all across the lower 48 states. (Distressing, Alaska and Hawaii, but you lot'll have to pay additional fees if you want some Omaha Steaks beefiness.)

Meal delivery services have their pros and cons, but it tin be hard to resist those rima oris-watering t-bones and porterhouses that Omaha Steaks is so well-known for. Only what do you need to know about Omaha Steaks, though, before jumping the gun on that $300 Steakhouse Extravaganza box? From their humble beginnings to how the company is expanding into new markets, this is the untold truth of Omaha Steaks.

Omaha Steaks is a true rags to riches story

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Believe it or not, Omaha Steaks hasn't always been the meat industry mainstay it is today. The Omaha Steaks story begins not in Omaha, Nebraska, but actually in Riga, Republic of latvia, during the 19th century. When the Simon family unit fled Latvia due to fervent antisemitism in the land, they somewhen wound up in Omaha, where they were amid the first waves of Jewish people to make their way into the city, according to Tablet Mag, a Jewish cultural mag.

The Simon family patriarch J.J. Simon and his son B.A. worked together as butchers — which was the family merchandise back in their European homeland — founding the Table Meat Supply Company in downtown Omaha in 1917. The company grew in popularity among local Omahans, and eventually changed its proper name to Omaha Steaks in 1966 every bit the company expanded out to sell their product in other states via the Spousal relationship Pacific Railroad.

More than a hundred years after Omaha Steaks' first inception as a company, the nutrient delivery service has grown all across the nation, raking in effectually one-half a billion dollars in revenue as Tablet reported back in 2017. According to the Omaha Steaks website, the visitor has become the country's largest straight response marketer of beefiness and gourmet food. Talk about fulfilling the American dream!

For 5 generations, Omaha Steaks has been a family business

In the company's century-long history, Omaha Steaks has remained a Simon family unit enterprise — the current CEO and owner, Bruce Simon is the bully-smashing-grandson of Omaha Steaks founder J.J. Simon. Simon has grown up in the family business concern and used to accompany his father to the plant as a child before working in that location during summer breaks from loftier school and higher. This made Bruce Simon a natural choice to step into the position, as he had served various other positions within the company until 1994, when he became president and CEO.

Unlike other meat manufacture giants like Tyson Foods and Oscar Mayer, Omaha Steaks remains a privately endemic company, meaning that investors cannot purchase shares of Omaha Steaks. While going public is typically looked at every bit a huge accomplishment for any major company, remaining a private, family-owned business has allowed the company to focus more on its long-term strategies, rather than constantly worrying about quarterly earnings.

The Omaha Steaks inventory has expanded beyond simply beefiness products

The proper noun "Omaha Steaks" is, absolutely, quite a scrap misleading. While beefiness might be what comes to mind when you first hear the company's name, you might be surprised to find that you lot can actually go a much wider range of specialty products. In the 1960s, Omaha Steaks began expanding its itemize from just offering steaks to besides include premium cuts of pork, poultry, and seafood. Since then, they've added an fifty-fifty more extensive range of products to the menu, as the company's delivery services have become much more widespread.

While steaks are nevertheless the prime number cut of meat at Omaha Steaks, you can actually purchase a huge range of products likewise their signature beefiness besides — from Shine-style kielbasa to hearty wild halibut fillets. They've even got an expansive gear up of accoutrements to serve alongside the main form, including charcuteries and murphy-based side dishes, as well as some decadent wines. Perfect for your next steak dinner. Or your next kielbasa dinner. Or your next halibut dinner.

Dry ice plays a key function with Omaha Steaks

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E'er wonder how Omaha Steaks manages to keep their products fresh, even while they're shipping them all the manner across the country? As Dr. Youling Xiong wrote in Lawrie's Meat Science, "Raw meat is one of the almost shelf-unstable nutrient materials due to its abundance in nutrients ideally suited for microorganisms." This means that transporting uncooked steak products from state to state (and sometimes state to country) takes a lot of care.

When the company began its mail-order operations in 1952, they settled on using wax-lined cartons filled with dry water ice to keep the meat cool — substantially mimicking a refrigerator. (This was before polystyrene shipping containers and vacuum packaging had become especially widespread commercial technology, you meet.) As polystyrene and vacuum packaging became more popular and mainstream, Omaha Steaks ditched the wax-lined containers and began using those, in conjunction with dry ice as the ways of keeping the meat absurd.

Vacuum packaging, combined with the dry water ice, ensures that the meat has no exposure to air — and thus, bacteria — while the dry water ice keeps the temperature down low without requiring any electricity.

Omaha Steaks has expanded into the pet nutrient market

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Does your dog whine and beg every fourth dimension you throw a steak on the grill? Next time you stock up on some Omaha Steaks, you lot might want to consider grabbing some of their signature dog treats, which the company added to their inventory simply around 17 years agone. As The New York Times reported in 2004, customers were constantly telling the visitor's management that they were feeding scraps from their Omaha Steaks products to their dogs and cats. Eventually, the company gave in and decided to capitalize on their popularity with pets and began making dog treats themselves in 2003.

Now, these pet treats aren't some downgraded, poor-quality meat scraps leftover from the higher quality cuts of meat meant for humans. As the quondam owner of the company Todd Simon told The New York Times, "We're basically using the verbal same production for humans without the loftier sodium content and some other spices." Co-ordinate to the Times, the visitor's dog treats very closely resemble Omaha Steaks' trademark beef jerky product, minus all the salt.

A little goes a long way at Omaha Steaks

Omaha Steaks is quite well-known for its lavish and pricey boxes of food. For case, some of these boxes, like their Gourmet Stock-Upward Package, which features filet mignon, sirloin, chicken breast, and many, many more meats and side dishes, will toll you a couple of hundred dollars. While these are nifty deals for doomsday preppers, chances are, you don't demand to be spending that much on some fancy meat that yous probably tin't get rid of fast enough.

That said, Omaha Steaks has plenty of more than reasonable packages for the everyday diner — as Business Insider reported in 2018, $20 can really go a long style over at Omaha Steaks. For starters, it's hard not to find at least a couple of promotional sales on their website. But also, you tin typically catch a pack of eight sausages (from Smoothen-mode kielbasa to archetype beef franks) for around — and a lot of times, just beneath — $20. The same goes for certain cuts of beef, like their tenderloin tips.

Merely what'south the signal of a cheap steak if information technology doesn't taste any good? As Business organisation Insider reported, the quality of what you get at Omaha Steaks typically surpasses that of what you can notice in your local supermarket. If you lot've got the extra greenbacks to spare and want to go to a local butcher or steakhouse, then, of form, y'all can't beat that — but Omaha Steaks might just be the next best thing.

Omaha Steaks got in trouble for violating telemarketing laws

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Possibly you lot've gotten a phone call or two from a robocaller at Omaha Steaks trying to sell us on their holiday gift box special that'south blimp to the brim with gourmet hamburgers and tri-tips galore. Well, in 2014, 1 man in Gresham, Oregon, had received just one call too many, as The Oregonian reported.

According to The Oregonian, Michael Hetherington received 10 unwarranted calls to his cell phone from the company over the course of only a little over a month in 2013. Hetherington did some research on laws surrounding telemarketing and realized that the company could be breaching the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. The act substantially states that companies aren't allowed to call customers without their permission nor can they utilize automatic programs to dial up random numbers — with added emphasis in regards to protecting cell telephone numbers. This is exactly what Omaha Steaks was doing when they called Hetherington those ten times and he filed a lawsuit confronting them in 2014.

The lawsuit grew into a wider class action suit and was somewhen settled about two years later in 2016, when the company had to shell out $5 million to customers they'd called in violation of the TCPA. Co-ordinate to Top Class Actions, a website investigating various form action suits across the land, customers began receiving checks from Omaha Steaks for around $40 in December 2016.

Omaha Steaks ran into trouble over their website

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When you lot hear about the Americans with Disabilities Act, it'south usually in reference to concrete entities — you know, things like wheelchair ramps, parking spots, or restroom accessibility. Just one little known fact virtually the ADA is that websites also accept a vague ready of rules they must follow in order to be in compliance with the act.

Some advocacy groups have been known to have businesses to court if their websites aren't easily accessible for blind users. Still, because these rules aren't quite set in stone (the ADA was enacted years before the Cyberspace had go a major facet of American life), these cases are often gauged on a instance-by-case basis.

Encounter, if a business organization's website isn't rendered properly and so that information technology can exist easily read using text-to-speech software, that essentially leaves the website useless and inaccessible for someone who'south visually impaired or blind. The Omaha World-Herald reported in 2017, that the advocacy group Access Now had partnered with 3 blind would-exist customers to sue Omaha Steaks for a number of accessibility issues with their website.

The company, however, claimed that it was planning on doing a complete renovation job on the website subsequently in 2018 and did not want to update its website until it rolled out the full update. The lawsuit was terminated shortly later information technology began, as the ADA is relatively vague with regards to internet compliance.

Omaha Steaks has had retail stores for decades

Yous're probably most familiar with the Omaha Steaks website, or maybe fifty-fifty their mail catalogs; afterward all, information technology'due south primarily known every bit a commitment service. But it does accept a handful of brick-and-mortar shops across the United states besides. According to the Omaha Earth-Herald, the commencement Omaha Steaks retail store opened up in the visitor'due south hometown in 1976, every bit a "pilot for possible similar operations throughout the land." Prior to opening up shop in downtown Omaha, customers could but purchase Omaha Steaks through the mail or at select restaurants carrying their products.

Though it was a pilot project, the company didn't really begin expanding its brick-and-mortar presence beyond Nebraska for nearly a decade. In 1985, the first retail shop exterior of the Cornhusker Country opened up in Houston, Texas. (Nowadays, Texas has surpassed even Nebraska as the state with the near Omaha Steaks stores.) The visitor has since opened up more than than 75 locations across the nation, so if yous're looking to get your hands on some Omaha Steaks, and yous demand them fast, you may only be able to drive on downward to your nearest location to stock up for the next family cook-out.

Omaha Steaks sources their beef from farms in the Midwest

omaha steaks sources beef from midwest farms

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Co-ordinate to data from the National Agronomical Statistics Service, Nebraska has a thou total of 6.3 million cattle, pregnant that bovines outnumber people in Nebraska by three-to-ane. That's more than cattle in the state than there are people in the entire city of Los Angeles!

In fact, Nebraska is the state with the 2d-highest cattle to people ratio (Due south Dakota is first, with about four.5 cattle for every person in the state) — then y'all know they take their beef seriously over in that location. According to Omaha Steaks, this beef-axial ethos is what's kept them in the country throughout their century-long history.

"This is the heart of beef state, and we dearest to share that quality with the rest of the country," reads a 2019 blog mail on the company's website.

The company prides itself on sourcing all of its beefiness from farms throughout the heartland of the U.s., and not outsourcing anything from cheaper, far away locations in S America or Australia. According to the company, all their steak products come up from grass-fed, grain-finished beefiness — another factor that helps boost the quality of your Omaha Steaks box-set.

Omaha Steaks workers are considered essential during the COVID-19 crisis

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When the COVID-19 outbreak hitting the United States, a number of meat processing facilities all across the nation institute themselves in the center of controversy. Workers at these plants were considered essential, and as such, many meat processing companies did not shut down their operations, according to a report from National Public Radio. Most notable has been Tyson Foods, which, co-ordinate to Business Insider, had been linked to effectually 4,500 COVID-19 cases nationwide.

Omaha Steaks wasn't quite in the clear either. Per an April 2020 press release, Omaha Steaks continued operations at its facilities and the company said it would be working to maintain social distancing measures at its facilities while besides allowing all staff at its plants paid ill leave. As of May 2020, Omaha Steaks has not been linked to whatsoever COVID-19 cases like some of its competition, just the mental attitude among its workers has been "primarily fear," as Eric Reeder, president of the union representing workers at both Omaha Steaks, Tyson, and Nestlé among others, told the Omaha World-Herald.

Omaha Steaks has been giving back during the pandemic

omaha steaks giving back during pandemic

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Although information technology may seem like a cold and distant corporate entity, at its core, Omaha Steaks however adheres to the mom-and-pop ethos that its founder J.J. Simon fostered when he first made his style to the United States. And a big part of that is giving back to the Omaha customs — the Simon family unit maintains shut ties to the urban center, carrying out various acts of service throughout Omaha and its surrounding regions.

The virtually recent example of that? The company's response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Co-ordinate to local news outlet NBC 6, Omaha witnessed huge spikes in unemployment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, during the week of April 4, 2020, more 25,000 people filed for unemployment (for a bit of context, the city of Omaha has only a little less than half a meg people).

In response, the Omaha Downtown Improvement Grouping partnered up with local businesses — Omaha Steaks included — to provide meals for a drive-thru nutrient pantry to help out those who were struggling with unemployment as a result of the crisis (via the Omaha Earth-Herald). While organizers were initially looking for discounted prices on food to requite out, Omaha Steaks reportedly refused to accept a single cent for any of the hamburger or pork chops that the company doled out.