Omaha Steaks
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| Privately held family business | |
| Industry |
Mail order Retail Gourmet food |
| Founded | 1917 |
| Headquarters | Omaha, Nebraska |
| Products | Food |
| Revenue | $450 million |
| Website | www.omahasteaks.com |
Omaha Steaks International, Inc., known as Omaha Steaks, is a family business that manufactures, markets, and distributes steaks, red meats, and gourmet foods. The company is named after the American city it was founded and is headquartered in, Omaha, Nebraska.
The company was founded in 1917 as a single butcher shop in Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha Steaks is a fifth-generation, privately held family business, that is now one of America’s largest marketers of beef. Omaha Steaks also owns an affiliate company, World Port Seafood.
J.J. Simon and his son, B.A. came to America to escape antisemitism. Passing through Ellis Island in 1898, they settled in Omaha because of the farmland's similarity to their homeland Riga, Latvia. They worked for nearly 20 years as butchers for other people. In 1917, the family founded Omaha Steaks as a cattle carcass operation at 17th and Douglas Streets.
The Simon family bought an old carpentry store, Table Supply Co., as the site for their meat-cutting business. In an effort to save money, B.A. moved the two letters "Co" to the right, inserted the word "Meat" and called their new company Table Supply Meat Co. By 1924, the business moved to a larger building at 1211 Howard Street, in the heart of the Old Market neighborhood, from which J.J. and B.A. began selling cuts of meat to local supermarkets and national chain grocery stores, as well as to hotel restaurants and institutional customers.
B.A.’s son, Lester Simon, is credited with introducing Omaha Steaks across the US, when he brokered a deal with the Union Pacific Railroad to begin serving Omaha Steaks in the dining cars of their transcontinental trains in the 1940s. Lester Simon hand-selected the meat for the Union Pacific passenger trains that traveled between Omaha and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. Train passengers who ordered Omaha Steaks in Union Pacific’s dining cars prompted the company to launch its first mail order ventures – magazine ads and direct mail flyers – in 1952. Lester Simon also began shifting Table Supply's focus from a butcher operation to the marketing of fine cuts of meat.
In 1952, the first mail order operation was launched to serve distant customers. The meat was shipped in wax-lined cartons filled with dry ice. It was not until the early 1960s that insulated shipping containers made of polystyrene and vacuum packaging, became available. In 1961, Nebraska Governor Frank B. Morrison sent steaks from Table Supply to President John F. Kennedy and all of the governors in the United States. In that same year, Table Supply was honored to be involved in the Culinary Olympics held in Frankfurt, Germany, at which the United States team won the Grand Gold Prize with a dish that featured aged prime ribs of beef provided by Table Supply, thereby earning an international reputation for the Omaha company.
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Wikipedia