MARTIN PREFERRED FOODS
Martin Preferred Foods is now in its third generation of family ownership , and over the course of the past seven decades , it has evolved through innovation , ingenuity , and good old fashioned hard work , into a processing powerhouse for customized meat and poultry products .
The story of Martin Preferred Foods began completely by accident , in wartime America .
Melvin and Israel Tapick were delivery boys for their mother ’ s corner store in Houston , Texas , back in 1944 and their job was to deliver to restaurants downtown and in the surrounding area .
One day approaching Thanksgiving that year , they made a delivery to a customer who was a chef at a local eatery , and he asked if they could procure some freshly killed turkeys for the upcoming holiday .
Although the two young men ’ s stock-in-trade was very much canned goods , they did not want to let their customer down and promised to find him some turkeys .
With no real idea of how they were actually going to do that , they asked around the local neighborhood , and were pointed in the direction of someone who raised turkeys .
Melvin and Israel bought the turkeys alive and took them back to the yard behind the store without any idea of what to do next . Under further instruction from a helpful neighbor , the audacious pair set about slaughtering and defeathering the birds .
It took an entire day , but when they were done they had some nicely dressed turkeys which they were ready to return to the man at the restaurant . They had no idea how much they should be charging but the chef , exemplifying the spirit of the time , said he ’ d pay what they were worth .
When he did , the pair realized that they made more profit on that one transaction than they had in a week
92 October 2017