"Butchery is in my blood," says shop owner Stephen Alexander.

The owner of Cumbrae's Naturally Raised Meats in Toronto has discovered that focusing on top quality in both his products and supply chain is setting him apart from bigger competitors, for whom price and volume are often the only driving forces.

And other Canadian merchants - from cattle farmers in Nanton, Alta., to West Coast cheesemakers - are following suit, catering to niche markets and fiercely loyal clientele who are demanding specialty products and service above and beyond what is perhaps more cheaply available on the mass market.

"I could afford to open five new locations five years ago," Alexander says, without a hint of conceit. Still, he waited almost 11 years before opening a second Toronto location in May.

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge
Cumbrae's Naturally Raised Meats owner Stephen Alexander learned the business at his father's side on the family farm.

Business has been very good, with sales having grown 15 to 20 per cent each year since he opened.

Foremost in Alexander's mind is maintaining quality. "In this business, you're only as good as your last steak," he says. "I live in fear that someone will taste one of my products at a dinner party and say: 'What's the big deal?' " Alexander may have butchery in his blood, but it all started on the farm.

He learned how to grade cattle, beginning at the age of 11, at his father's side. He also learned the business model that would serve him in his own retail operation years later.

Alexander's father also apprenticed as a butcher, at first selling meat in volume because his prices were low. Business was brisk, but it dropped abruptly when a large chain opened up across the street. Within the year, he was forced to sell his business and vowed never again to do business on price.

He went high-end instead, with a focus on quality where chains can't compete, and he prospered.

John Scott, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, says the market supports this model. Scott told Canadian Grocer recently that consumers can expect to see more high-end meat stores and that independent gourmet stores could capture as much 20 per cent of the market.

Some western businessmen are following the same recipe.

About 70 kilometres south of Calgary, near Nanton, is the A7 Ranch, an established brand in Alberta's cattle country.

Its first owner, A.E. Cross, was one of the ranchers known as the Big Four who founded the Alberta cattle industry and started the Calgary Stampede in 1912.

Like Alexander, today's owner John Cross is a third-generation practitioner of the family business.

But unlike Alexander, Cross is taking a path completely different from his father who, as did most of his peers, used pesticides freely and heavily.

Cross calls himself a grass farmer whose byproduct is beef.

He's found a way to care for the land by rotating his grazing herds in a way that cultivates an indigenous grass known as rough fescue, considered to be exceptional cattle feed.

"Because he doesn't have a mortgage, since the farm is long paid for, he doesn't have as much pressure to generate revenue," says ranch manager John Burk.

Cross has become a caretaker of the land on his sprawling ranch, and because of his reputation, buyers come to him for auctioning. The industry norm is for farmers to pay to transport their cattle to auction and then to slaughter.

Since he grows solely to feed his own stock, which in turn keeps the grass growing and rejuvenates the earth, Cross doesn't pay the fuel and mechanical costs of harvesting, baling and distributing hay.

That kind of quality and attention to detail is important to merchants such as Alexander.

He bought the meat shop from Alistair Robinson, the original owner of Cumbrae Farm - south of Brantford - in 1995 and hired long-time colleague Nathan Pond, "who runs the farm like it's his own.”

(By early 2003, Alexander purchased the farm.)

Robinson stayed on to offer advice when needed and to work with Pond to develop the wholesale part of the business. Together they won over most of Niagara wine country's fine-dining chefs.

Instead of expanding in a conventional sense, Alexander concentrated on strengthening the foundation and developing the brand that offers what he calls "peerless" meats.

He's also assembled a stable of "farmer-partners," as he calls them - local micro-producers who raise their livestock naturally to produce good-quality meat. With many, he's forged exclusivity contracts by promising to buy their entire annual production provided they agree not to sell to anyone else. He guards their identity like state secrets, a testament to the value he puts on the quality of his suppliers.

Alexander is also a shrewd purveyor of speciality products such as fois gras, buying from all over Canada and the United States. "If it's good and they ship, we want it," he says.

On Alexander's radar is West Coast cheese-maker David Wood, who coincidentally was a Toronto gourmet retailer before moving to Salt Spring Island 16 years ago.

Wood was far ahead of his time, opening a large upmarket food shop in the well-heeled Toronto neighbourhood of Rosedale long before anyone had heard of Williams Sonoma. While there was considerable interest, there were not enough shoppers.

Wood has heard about Alexander from his Toronto friends "as the guy to go to for meat. He's obviously done an excellent job building his reputation."

The reciprocal is also true. Alexander knows about Wood's cheese, as do Toronto foodies, because the press for his Salt Spring Island Cheese Co. is good and online gourmet forums extol the virtues of his products.

In October, Wood will be licensed to sell outside the province, but he has no further interest in retail.

"It takes a special set of skills," he says. "If I were to open a cheese shop in Vancouver, I don't think I could do a better job of retailing than (organic grocery chain) Whole Foods," which stocks his cheese.

For Alexander, getting Toronto chefs excited about the quality of his meat was important.

"If you make them happy, your customers will be happy," he says. Some chefs have been known to use the word "artful" when describing the marbling of his meat. They also honour the Cumbrae brand by giving it marquee status on their menus.

Chef-restaurateur Paul Rogalski says he would love to follow Alexander's example of buying a farm's annual production as a way to safeguard the quality of supply, "but we're too small."

The co-owner of Rouge restaurant in Calgary grows as much of his own produce as possible. But meat is another story. "We could certainly share that cost with another restaurant or two," he adds.

The business decisions being made by merchants and producers such as Alexander and Cross are having positive vertical repercussions.

Alexander makes it possible for some lucky micro-farmers to thrive without competing with the big guys, even though they could easily beat them on quality.

And Cross sets an example by producing just what he needs - while bringing his vast acreage back to life for the next generation's producers.

(Stephanie Ortenzi can be reached at ortenzi@businessedge.ca)