Nick Wallace wants to create Airbnb of agriculture with seated farm dinners across Iowa

Nick Wallace wants to build a billion-dollar hyper-local food movement.

He has plans to expand his meat delivery service 99 Counties, which drops farm-raised cuts at doorsteps in suburban neighborhoods and urban enclaves across Iowa with the help of Amazon-style vans, into a massive business.

The company connects farmers and food processors in the state with customers who want fresh products delivered straight to their homes. Twenty-six farmers and seven artisan processors have partnered with the company to do "the hard stuff" so producers can focus on daily tasks.

"If Airbnb and Uber can take off … then what if we could do that with farmers and artisan food makers?" Wallace said.

The movement of buying locally grown foods has multiplied in recent years with the birth of companies like 99 Counties.

Companies such as Omaha Steaks started more than a century ago as a butcher in Omaha. By 1952, the company started running ads in magazines to sell Nebraska beef, now delivered to homes in a polystyrene insulated cooler with dry ice to keep flights of burgers and racks of ribs cold.

ButcherBox launched in 2015 after founder Mike Salguero connected with a local cattle farmer who sold grass-fed beef. The company brought in an estimated $600 million in 2022, according to Shopify.

In between, consumers can find everything from just chicken from Cooks Venture and Pasturebird or just beef from Snake River Farms delivered either through a weekly subscription or on an on-call basis.

Wallace, the trucker hat-donning food delivery founder, is adding a twist to his method of delivering meat in Iowa and Chicago. He's hitting the road in a Ford F-350 pickup truck this spring and traversing the state with a series of farm-to-table dinners featuring Iowa food vendors.

"We're trying to appeal to the people in the cities who want to care a little bit more about their food," Wallace said during a Zoom interview in his Keystone kitchen west of Cedar Rapids.

'We'll be a food company'

Wallace lives off a gravel road just south of Keystone on his family's Wallace Farms, a 300-acre property that has been handed down through six generations.

Wallace grew up in Strawberry Point, a town of around 1,100 people northwest of Dubuque, in the state's Driftless region. He left to play college baseball out west in Oregon and then headed back home to finish his studies at the University of Iowa.

Near his college commencement, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of lymphatic cancer. He speculates his cancer was likely caused by toxic elements in the ground he ingested by licking baseballs before a pitch and chemicals from growing up in a farming community.

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Later, he worked in insurance for a number of years in the Chicago metro area, the sole 99 Counties market outside of Iowa. He moved to Colorado, left for Des Moines, and settled in Keystone after craving space to roam and room to clear his mind.

"I was just going to live in a shack on the farm," he said. "I was so over the cities and the traveling. I just literally needed my space at that point."

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Wallace and his family launched Wallace Farms with grass-fed cattle around two decades ago with the goal of raising non-GMO, sustainably sourced, chemical-free meat.

In 2022, Wallace launched 99 Counties to bring that food to homes via porch deliveries and a $99 annual membership fee that includes free delivery service and 20% off all products.

"If I could just get people to spend $100 a month on high-quality proteins and we'll move into the space of other foods, we'll be a food company," Wallace said. "But right now, we're just a high-quality meat company."

Companies such as 99 Counties and its counterparts are growing a next-gen model amid an increasing trend for farmers in the state to band together to sell their meat and produce as customers become more interested in where their food originates.

“It absolutely is growing,” said Iowa State University small farms program manager Christa Hartsook.

According to Hartsook, producers across Iowa find greater market share by working together to help increase their voice and product volume. Companies like 99 Counties and ChopLocal, a Wayland-based online meat marketplace, that brings family farms and small butcher shops to folks’ front doors, are helping connect consumers directly to fresh foods.

“Within Iowa, we’re seeing this on both the produce and the protein side. We have nine food hubs working in the state to aggregate product from producers and sell to larger institutions,” Hartsook said. “These all have different business models, but the same goal — to expose and elevate Iowans’ awareness of local products.”

Dinner series kicks off in April, will head to Cedar Rapids, Dubuque and the Quad Cities

On Friday, 99 Counties will host its first sit-down dinner at Curate event space in the East Village neighborhood near downtown Des Moines. The menu will feature tossed chicken wings, pork, grass-fed beef, old-fashioned french fries, craft cocktails, specialty kombucha beverages, and a sweet sourdough dessert from Bread by Chelsa B.

"It's going to be a culinary rotation, so everybody can mingle and go to their favorite," he said. "They'll get small plates, then try it, then go back and get more — they can go wherever they want, float around."

Wallace and 99 Counties are planning up to four other dinners in Davenport, Dubuque, and the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids corridor, he said.

Following the dinner, 99 Counties will host an open conversation about agriculture and its industry problems, how the company plans to solve identifiable issues and how it will build a community through its membership.

"It doesn't do me any good to be another freaking corporation that's telling everybody what to do," Wallace said about the sit-down conversation.

Wallace wants to build his own cruelty-free, grass-fed corporation.

Des Moines Farm Dinner

Location: Curate, 322 E. Court Ave., Des Moines

Menu: Chicken wings, pork, grass-fed beef, old-fashioned french fries, and sweet sourdough dessert

Tickets: $99 each, includes membership, meat bundle, dinner ticket; 99counties.com

Contact: contact@99counties.com; 319-442-3244

Jay Stahl is an entertainment reporter at The Des Moines Register. Follow him on Instagram or reach out at jstahl@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Nick Wallace of 99 Counties wants to expand hyper-local food movement