Bay Area based Belcampo shutters all its California restaurants
FILE — Bay Area-based Belcampo, a sustainable butcher and farm, abruptly closed all its California restaurant locations following a scandal in May where it mislabeled meat at its Santa Monica store.
FilmMagicBay Area-based Belcampo Meat Co., lauded for its sustainability practices, has closed all of its restaurants following a May scandal that revealed the company sold meat cuts by other purveyors and labeled them as their own.
The closures came Monday, according to Eater, which also pointed out that all of its social media accounts have subsequently been deleted. Calls made by SFGATE to Bay Area locations in Oakland and San Mateo went unanswered.
Beyond the restaurant closures in Northern and Southern California, the company will cease its retail and e-commerce operations, co-CEO Garry Embleton said in a statement. He added that while Belcampo has ended, it might continue to offer “non-branded products through new distribution channels.”
“The company’s supply chain, farm and processing facility are both best in class, and we hope that there are opportunities to collaborate with companies eager to provide consumers with meat products that meet those high standards,” Embleton said.
The closure comes months after Evan Reiner, a former butcher at the Santa Monica Belcamp outpost, exposed the company for mislabeling cuts of meat from outside companies all while raising prices. In a viral Instagram post from May, Reiner shared that many of the items the company said were sustainable and organic were actually imported from Tasmania or shipped from Montana, among others. Reiner also showed a box with goods from Mary’s Chicken.
After an investigation, Belcampo co-founder Anya Fernald told The San Francisco Chronicle that the Santa Monica store did not follow protocols for sourcing products and failed to inform customers on the true origins of the meat products. (SFGATE and The San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of each other.)
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