Overloaded Interior Alaska meat processor rocked by widespread complaints

FAIRBANKS - After Travis Marsh shot his first moose back in September, a nice 52-inch bull near Delta Junction, he couldn't have been happier. The thought of having a full freezer of tasty, high-protein meat made his mouth water.

Marsh, of Wasilla, and his hunting partner, Justin Morgan of Fairbanks, took the moose to Tanana Valley Meats, a USDA-certified slaughterhouse and meat processing plant off the Richardson Highway between Fairbanks and North Pole. Morgan knew the plant had just opened, it was USDA-certified and he had read a couple of good reviews about it on the Internet.

But Marsh and Morgan were left with a bad taste in their mouths after waiting almost two months to get their meat back, and they say it was rancid. Not to mention the fact that Marsh dropped off 421 pounds of meat to be processed and got back less than 200 pounds.

"I took very good care of my meat," Marsh said. "I spent three days taking care of this meat in the field, waking up in the middle of the night to turn it because it was warm out.

"I was proud to get my first moose, and now it doesn't even taste good," he said. "I was ready to cry about it. I'm really pissed off."

He isn't the only one.

Alaska State Troopers in Fairbanks received numerous complaints from hunters who took their moose, caribou and sheep meat to Tanana Valley Meats to be processed, said Sgt. Scott Quist with Alaska Wildlife Troopers in Fairbanks.

"We talked to the (Department of Environmental

The state Department of Environmental Conservation visited the plant on two occasions in response to complaints, one from troopers and one from a customer, but didn't issue any citations.

"We went out and did a pretty extensive investigation to the extent that any (game meat) products may have impacted products in the part of plant we regulate," said Lorinda Lhotka, an environmental health officer with DEC in Fairbanks. "We had to work with them on some storage issues and notified the USDA of those issues."

While the slaughtering of domestic livestock is highly regulated by the DEC and USDA, wild game meat processing doesn't fall under the authority of any state or federal agency.

The state's wanton waste law applies to hunters who salvage meat from animals, not processors who cut it up, Quist said.

The DEC regulates sanitary conditions in relation to how commercial meat is stored and sold.

"We don't have clear regulatory authorities to regulate custom processing for game submitted by hunters," said Ron Klein, food safety and sanitation program manager for the DEC in Anchorage. "There is no agency that does that. It really is a gray area."

With game animals, nobody except the hunter has any control how an animal is butchered or handled in the field, he said.

"Those issues make it difficult for us to regulate game meat processing," he said. "Whether the state should be doing that or not is a policy decision for public or the legislature to make."

The USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service oversees the slaughtering and processing of animals at processing plants, but it does not have jurisdiction over wild game unless it's affecting the facility's USDA requirements, said Mark Aherns with the USDA in Anchorage. Aherns would not confirm or deny the USDA had received any complaints about Tanana Valley Meats.

Troopers, meanwhile, are conferring with the attorney general's office to determine whether any charges will be filed, Quist said.

Tanana Valley Meats manager and head meatcutter Stacy Hansen, as well as plant president Scott Miller, acknowledge mistakes were made in the plant's game processing this fall, and Miller said he is "trying to make it right" with dissatisfied customers.

The problem, both men said, was that the plant got overwhelmed with moose in September and didn't have enough meatcutters to deal with it.

Hansen doesn't know how many moose they took in but figures it was more than 200. Hunting season ended two months ago, but the plant still has 60 to 70 moose to process. The moose are frozen in refrigerator vans outside the plant.

"I know we have unhappy people," Miller said. "How can you not have unhappy people when you tell people it's going to be three or four weeks before they get their meat back and it's two months?"

Miller said he has a list of about a half-dozen customers who have called to complain about how long it took to process their meat or the bad-tasting meat. One of the complainants is threatening a civil suit against the Tanana Valley Meats because he and his hunting partners took in 315 pounds of moose meat to get ground up and it all came back bad.

In that case, Miller said he offered to replace the hunter's 315 pounds of moose with beef, a trade the hunter seemed receptive to but had not agreed to as of Friday. In other cases, the plant has reduced processing fees or offered full refunds, he said.

"It depends on the complaint," Miller said. "For the most part, people have been nice about it. People don't seem to want to drive us out of business or bankrupt us."

Tanana Valley Meats has gone through a tumultuous few years. Started as B-Y Farms in 1989, the plant was purchased by a group of local investors in 2007 when the original owners, Bob and Yvonne Franklin, went out of business.

The slaughterhouse operated without a USDA certificate for nearly two years, doing custom processing, before finally regaining its USDA certification in June.

"Our main focus with this business is quality control and customer service," Miller said at the time.

After taking some meat to be processed at Tanana Valley Meats two years ago and liking what he got back, Jake Horazdovsky decided to take 80 pounds of trimmed moose meat in to get made into sausage when he got a moose in early September.

This time, though, the results weren't the same. Horazdovsky didn't get his meat back until late October, and he claims it was rotten.

"It's rank," he said, unwrapping a package for a reporter to sniff in his apartment off Farmer's Loop. "I cooked it and it's so bad."

Horazdovsky, who called the Department of Fish and Game and troopers to complain, is the only person who personally brought meat back to him claiming it was bad, Hansen said.

The way Horazdovsky tells it, Hansen admitted the meat was bad. He told Hansen he wanted his money back plus $2 per pound for the meat he brought in, at which point Hansen "came unglued."

Hansen's side of it is that he acknowledged the meat was bad and Horazdovsky then became "unruly" and wanted "an ungodly amount" of money. Hansen said he offered to give Horazdovsky his money back.

Horazdovsky didn't get any money and he still has his rotten meat sitting in a friend's freezer.

"I have a hard time throwing all this away," he said. "You shoot a moose; you eat it."

After waiting three weeks for his meat, Marsh said he called Tanana Valley Meats and was told it would be another two or three weeks before it was done. He sent Morgan out to pick up the meat to take some place else.

When Morgan arrived, he said nobody could find their meat. He started poking around in the refrigerator vans himself and was appalled by what he discovered."

"It was piles of meat on top of piles of meat," he said. "It was in refrigerator vans, but the doors were open. It was filth. That's not how you deal with meat."

Morgan took some pictures on his iPhone until Hansen grabbed it away from him. Hansen then threatened to call troopers and kicked him off the property, Morgan said.

Morgan called Miller and another plant owner to express his displeasure. Then he called Alaska State Troopers, who told him that game meat processing does not fall under the state's wanton waste law and is not under troopers' jurisdiction. DEC told him the same thing.

"That's the story I got from everybody," Morgan said. "Everybody saw these pictures and there wasn't a damn thing done about it."

He and Morgan talked about taking some of the moose they kept and the meat they got back from Tanana Valley Meats to have it DNA tested to see if it's the same meat, but didn't see what good it would do at this point.

As for what he plans to do with the meat of the the first moose he shot, Marsh said, "I'm going to give it to a dog musher."

One factor in the equation, according to Hansen, is that hunters don't always take as good a care of their meat as they might think they do.

"If these folks shoot a very large moose and do not get it out of the field in timely fashion and don't get it to us to get cooled properly there starts to be bone sour going on," the meatcutter said. "If you drop an inch cube piece of bone sour meat into a 200-pound batch of meat, the whole batch is going to go bad."

Marsh and Horazdovsky claim they took excellent care of the animals they killed and the meat was perfectly fine when they dropped it off in person.

Hansen countered, "Every hunter says that."

Some hunters - Hansen didn't recall their names - dropped moose off before the plant opened and left them lying on the loading dock for hours, Hansen said.

"I would come into work and I would find up to five moose laying on our dock that were turned in at 3, 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning," he said. "I'd come in and find animals lying at the back door."

Asked why he didn't turn the meat away and tell hunters to come pick it up, Hansen said he had to move it anyway to get into the plant, and the only place to move it was into refrigerator vans.

As for the stories and photos on the Internet that show open refrigerator vans with piles of moose quarters piled on top of each other, Hansen said "everybody's got their own side to the story."

In hindsight, Hansen and Miller said the plant should have stopped taking in moose at some point. Hansen said he should have inspected each animal more thoroughly to ensure it was in good condition and had more experienced help on hand.

From Miller's point of view, the situation that unfolded at Tanana Valley Meats was a result not being able to say no. It also is evidence of how badly Fairbanks needs a meat processing plant, he said.

"It looks to me like the mistake we made is we were too nice and people took advantage of us," Miller said. "This whole thing backs up the point of how huge the demand is for a meat processing plant in North Pole."

Next year, Tanana Valley Meats won't make the same mistake, Miller said.

"If I'm still president and Tanana Valley Meats is still open and still in existence, I can't tell you we'll process another pound of game meat," Miller said. "I keep pinching myself, hoping this nightmare will be over."

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