Ground broken for butchery in Comanche

A new business is in the process of becoming a reality in Comanche. The ground has been broken for Red Plains Grand Butchery just west of the Field of Dreams ball fields off Highway 53.

Trey and Jessica Clinkenbeard are the owners of the business. Trey, 36, owns Delbert’s Supermarket along with his father Greg. He started as a sacker at the age of 15 and gradually worked his way up to becoming a partner in 2012.

Ryan Walden will be the managing partner for Red Plains. An outdoorsman since his childhood, Walden learned how to hunt, fish, clean and preserve food and game. Walden used his love for the outdoors to get jobs, first cutting ribeyes at a restaurant to working in the meat market of a local grocery store through high school and college.

He also opened a taxidermy business that eventually grew into a custom processing facility. Overall, Walden has about 20 years of experience in the meat industry.

Red Plain Grand Butchery will be a custom meat processing business that deals directly with ranchers.

“We hope to become a connection point between local ranchers, sale barns and the consumer by creating a branded product that we can market nationwide,” Clinkenbeard said. “However, we expect the majority of our business to be centered around the custom processing of beef and swine.”

They will have a three-prong approach to the business plan - custom processing, launching a branded program, creating a branded line of items.

Clinkenbeard said the branded program will “evolve as we go along but we intend to have a website and marketing strategy. Our plan is to form some sort of co-op with local ranchers to help market their herd to allow them to bring premium prices.”

After that gets going, the plan is to start making their own beef jerky, summer sausage and snack sticks to sell through a direct store delivery distribution network.”

Clinkenbeard said it was important to build the business in Comanche.

“There have been a lot of good and exciting things happening in our community,” Clinkenbeard said. “I’m hoping to help continue the momentum of improving our community by providing more jobs and making us less reliable on having to travel out of town to conduct business.”

He went on to say large corporations are slowly choking out the local grocery industry.

“Ryan and I were talking one day about two years ago and we started brainstorming and dreaming up all the possibilities one would have if you combine the proper resources with the proper experience and know-how,” Clinkenbeard said. “The possibilities were endless. So, we started down a path that brought us to this point.”

The goal is to be open sometime in the spring of 2022. There will initially be eight to 10 employees and could grow to as large as 18 depending on the success of the business.

“We could have easily went to Duncan, but it was very important to me that this business be located in Comanche,” he said.

He said there has been a concern about the smell of the facility and the location being close to the school and ballfields and making sure that it doesn’t become a problem.

“It is of the utmost imporatnce to Ryan and I that this facility doesn’t put off a bad smell and we are taking every precaution to see to it that we accomplish that goal,” Clinkenbeard said. “We have hired an experienced consultant to help us with this and every other aspect of the process.”