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Many folks may not be aware of the Axis deer problem in Hawaii. After being brought to the islands in the mid-1800s, their populations have exploded and now in some places, greatly outnumber the people.

The is not only bad for the animals – they starve to death (it’s a “natural” death, so don’t worry) but it’s also harmful to the environment and impacts the people.

These are problems my guest today knows all too well. Meet Jake Muise, co-founder of Maui Nui Venison. The Maui Nui mission is “to help balance Axis deer populations for the good of our environment, communities, and food system.” 

In short, Jake and his team are using this invasive species to create a nutrient-dense food source for the people of Hawaii.

All of Maui Nui’s products are delicious and packed with high-quality nutrients. Plus, the USDA oversees their entire process and inspects each animal before approving it as safe for human consumption.

During my conversation with Jake, his passion for the work and respect for the animal shines through. Listen in to find out:

• Jake’s background
• The history of Axis deer in Hawaii
• The impact of Axis deer on the food, water, and landscape of Hawaii
• Public hunting of deer in Hawaii
• The art and science of Maui Nui Venison harvesting
• The difference in taste and nutrition profile of Axis deer
• The ideal employee for Maui Nui

I can’t say enough great things about Maui Nui Venison – from their employment practices to their respect for the animals, to the quality of their products. It’s inspiring.

 

Resources:

Dr. Stephan van Vliet

Bryan Mayer

 

Connect with Maui Nui Venison:

Website: Maui Nui Venison

Instagram: @mauinuivenison

Twitter: @mauinuivenison

Facebook: Maui Nui Venison

 

Episode Credits:

Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.

If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community plus so much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.

Today’s podcast is sponsored by Alec’s Ice Cream, the first and only verified regenerative, organic ice cream and the best-tasting ice cream I have ever had. They use 100% A2 dairy so even for those of you who are sensitive to dairy, you may find that Alec’s is a treat for your tastebuds and your insides. Check it out by going to sustainabledish.com/icecream and use code DIANA for 20% off your order. 

 

Quotes:

“So it is just this amazing complex issue of [the deer’s] impacts from – we call it Mauka to Makai, from the mountain to the ocean.” – Jake Muise 

“Your food system starts right there. If the animal is under no stress, you have the opportunity to harvest that animal. If it is, then it walks away and it’s not a part of your evening.” – Jake Muise

“Because natural death is not just closing your eyes and going to sleep and never waking up again. It is very brutal.” – Diana Rodgers, RD

“What we’re building in this tool or solution, it’s also having a great impact within our community. So there’s just a lot of really great reasons to help us eat this animal.” – Jake Muise

 

Transcript:

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance an initiative, advocating for the inclusion of animal source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now on to our show. 

(Alec’s Ice Cream Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD

Today’s podcast is sponsored by Alec’s Ice Cream, the first and only verified regenerative, organic ice cream and the best-tasting ice cream I have ever had. They use 100% A2 dairy so even for those of you who are sensitive to dairy, you may find that Alec’s is a treat for your tastebuds and your insides. So if you want an out-of-this-world, delicious, and creamy ice cream, that’s also earth and gut friendly, give this stuff a try. My favorite flavor is the Matcha Chocolate Chip but they also have a bunch of other delicious options. Check it out by going to sustainabledish.com/icecream and use code DIANA for 20% off your order. That’s sustainabledish.com/icecream and you can get 20% off with my name D-I-A-N-A so check it out and now on to the show.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Welcome back to the podcast everyone. Today I have with me Jake from and I’m going to try to pronounce this because you helped me earlier –  Maui Nui Venison?

Jake Muise  

Got it.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Okay. You guys reached out to me. And I’ve been super busy lately. And I feel like I was like pushing it off just because I had so many other things going on. And I’m so excited of the persistence think of Brian, right, who was the one that was like pushing our intros, what you guys are doing is so cool. And I’m so excited to let everyone who is listening in on the amazing work that you’re doing. It is so great. I mean harvesting protein from invasive deer in Hawaii. And it happens to taste incredible. Not only the fresh product, which is not gamey at all, but also the dried stuff you’ve sent me. I mean, the whole process of what you’re doing. So before I just kind of like spoil it for everybody, why don’t you just kind of take a step back? How did you get into this? How did this all start? And just kind of walk us through what you’re doing?

Jake Muise  

Sure. I mean, first, thank you so much. We appreciate anytime we get to have a conversation, especially with somebody like yourself, I think when Brian connected us, the first thing I saw on your website was Sustainavore I was like, Oh, she’s our people like that’s, that’s what we’re trying to do. Wow. So if we’re 15 years into this, I think it starts like a really long time ago back when I grew up in northern Alberta as I think when I defined now as a subsistence hunter like my dad, like we ate moose meat all year long in one form or the other. And then when I came to the University of Hawaii to play volleyball, had no idea there was like any type of game mammals or anything here was long story short was tonight, which is hānaied, adopted by a local family here on the island of Moloka’i. And the then east coast of Canada where we live, it was too far to go like back and forth. So they would like bring me over for, you know, any like Thanksgiving vacations anytime we had time off. And my first trip over realizing that there are like there’s deer and pheasants and all these amazing things like it was a home away from home. And then again, a very long story short, over the years it would – there was a gradual realization of the total impact of that animal in our places here in Hawaii. And the understanding that it wasn’t just something that was recreational. Hawaii has no predators. Year-round perfect weather. They happen to introduce one of the only deer species that can breed year-round. Most deer species’ sperm isn’t viable after they cast their antlers. Their antlers fall off every year. And testosterone levels drop low enough that they’re not like that sperm isn’t viable. Axis deer are one of the few that are. So total population dynamics is like 33% turnover every year, which is just crazy.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I’m sorry to interrupt, but let’s talk about so how did these deer get here? And who introduced them? And yeah, just talk a little bit about like this massive problem that they’re creating by not having any predators and having just like this gigantic salad bar of Hawaii.

Jake Muise  

Yeah, so 1868 two bucks and five does came from India. King  Kamehameha V brought them in. And he specifically sought after this species, which was so interesting. Hawaiian history is incredible. And they were like, so educated and so literate. My wife translates Hawaiian newspapers. Fun fact, only 5% of Hawaiian newspapers have been digitized. 95% of their culture is like sitting in writing, like waiting to be digitized and then translated. Anyway, but 1868-70 arrived, you take some to the island of Moloka’i and I don’t think he understood like, obviously like the total impact. By 1890 they had already hired California shooters. And they recorded shooting 4000 deer by like early 1900s. Territorial governments were already having like crazy heated debates. Then in the 1920s, they were introduced to the Island of Lanai. And then in the 1960s, they were introduced to the Island of Maui. Even after…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Why were they introduced? Like if they were already having a problem, and wait, why were they even introduced in the first place? Was it just like an exotic fun project? Or…

Jake Muise  

King… what we’ve been able to read is he introduced them as a food resource, not understanding their total impact. And like the Kamaʻāina or the local people, like within 20 or 30 years, were saying like, Wait, they’re eating our forests. And I think that’s why the management for these animals started like 100 plus years ago. They were introduced in the 1920s to the Island of Lanai, which is very small. It’s about like half Moloka’i is only like 10 miles by 30 miles. Lanai is half that size. And they were introduced by the then landowner. Lanai is owned by a single landowner and has been. It’s now Larry Ellison, but that island has, I think that island has about 4000 people and has over 22,000 deer. Now, so what’s really interesting is, and then skip forward to answer your question, 1959-1960 they had all these deer ready to go on the Island of Lanai to introduce to Hawaii Island, which is the biggest Hawaiian Island, all the Hawaiian Islands can fit inside Hawaii Island. It’s huge. And Maui and the folks in Hawaii Island like we’re in an uproar, there was a like, there’s actually a bill that ordered their introduction, and all of the ranches and everybody in Hawaii Island and were like, “What are you talking about?” They have people from the National Parks writing in like, “No way.” The powers that be on Maui, it was the state that then introduced them to the Island of Maui in 1959-1960 and I think definitely understanding in general terms, the impact of their introduction, and then also probably the value seen on the accounting side. So either way, they made that call. What gets really interesting is Moloka’i and Lanai, which of those two smaller islands are at carrying capacity. So that population has grown to a place where there’s as many deer as there’s going to be and it’s fluctuating every single year based on available feed. And then these natural resets and unfortunately, those natural resets are deer – 1000s of deer die from starvation, which is you know, so sad, right? On Maui, we only operate on Maui, and this is the very reason we started on Maui. Introduced in 1960, there are about 47,000 deer right now in the core Maui area. So probably about 60,000 deer island-wide. There’s going to be 210,000 deer unless we get ahead of populations. And we’re going to see the same level of like severe impact of an at-scale dense population like they see on Lanai and Moloka’i, which is nothing to be – almost impossible to farm without a 10-foot fence. And then, you know, massive impacts to our watersheds, our food systems where we try and grow things, and conversely, like the sediment that runs onto our reef is like the number one form of pollution right now for our reefs. It’ll cover and choke those reefs and then severely affects our food resources in the ocean. So…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Deer poop you’re saying. Deer poop

Jake Muise  

Well, deer poop will definitely like get in like some of the… like last summer one of the favorite swimming bays had leptospirosis all summer because there was so much poop that’d run off of the hard pan up above. But more importantly, it is a double-edged sword. Imagine, we’re volcanic islands. It takes a long time to form soil, which happens to be some of the greatest soil on the planet. And then you get these now like, they feel like weather events like we never get like nice light rain anymore. We just get like crazy rain. And guess what happens? All of that soil goes straight down the hill,

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Because the deer have eaten all of the grasses that are holding the soil in place. And so all the erosion. 

Jake Muise  

Yeah. Well, not they’re eating the grasses, and then they’re also their fringe grazers. So they work from like the outside of pastured areas in, and they’re also transitioning pastures into invasive weeds and invasive trees. And so the cattle don’t do that. They’ll leave like this much grass on the exteriors but deer can eat it right down to the ground and then that soil is bare and something can be introduced to it, right. So a double-edged sword of like both sediment and scat. So it is just this amazing complex issue of their impacts from we call it Mauka to Makai, like from the mountain to the ocean. And being one of the most isolated land masses on the planet, probably one of their most severe impacts is how our watersheds function. Our watersheds were designed to be sponges and capture all of this rain and fog and mist. And deer will go in there and impact those adversely because it will change the plant diversity. And what I mean: food is important to think about how important water is on the most isolated landmass on the planet. So a whole bunch and that’s the shortlist of cumulative negative impacts. And then you have, and I want to be really careful here because my introduction to Axis deer was only positive to start. Like I was a starving college kid that goes, like got to go to Moloka’i for a $50 plane ride, harvest a whole bunch of animals and like bring back like – I remember like not fitting in… Remember little college freezers? Like not fitting in the little college freezer, but feeling excessively rich that my little freezer was full of Axis deer and I didn’t have to go to the cafeteria for the next three months. That’s the place I started. Everything I understand about them has started from this place of them as a resource. And I think that’s ultimately what has created a lot of the management strategies and a lot of what we think to what the future of their population could look like, you know, on the Hawaiian Islands, because we’re not, we don’t support a total eradication. They have a place here. But it’s at balance. It’s at something that works for communities and watersheds, and they belong in some places, and they definitely don’t belong in other places.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

So that’s interesting. Tell me why you don’t support total eradication? Are you saying just because they’re a valuable food source to people with the meat?

Jake Muise  

Yes. And what’s interesting is, they’re valuable within our food systems. So when we think of like the watersheds, we just talked about, the cumulative value of that water, there’s nothing more important than that water to our communities moving forward. They don’t belong in those spaces where they’ll impact water. But why as you like, move down the mountain towards where our food systems are, and what a sustainable Hawaii looks like, over the next 100 years. We import 95% of our food. And when you look at and you’ve really helped me understand this conversation, and as I better understand when you look at nutrient density. So what amount of nutrients can you produce for your community in those spaces? They, at balance, they’re one of the most nutrient-dense foods we can produce using that same landmass. Right. And then, for our communities, there are – remember I grew up in northern Alberta as a subsistence hunting, eating moose. For our communities, there’s also resource accessibility in this extraordinary, like nutrient-dense product or food that they can go get themselves as well. And what’s most important to understand is we don’t decide that. Maui Nui Venison works only with private landowners. There’s lots of public hunting areas that the community go. We don’t impact those areas, or we don’t work directly in them. We’re working with private landowners, a lot of them that actually trying to pivot to regenerative ag with cattle to say like, what’s a balance? They have value to those ranchers as a recreationally like trying to figure out like, what’s the balance for each one of these places? And luckily, what we do probably better than anybody is we’ve really, and I didn’t realize this till recently. We really innovated over the years, like our population surveys. We have some of the best forward-looking infrared technology in the world, which is this device that can pick up heat signatures, and we use that from a helicopter and through drones. And to within like, 98% we know the exact density of those populations at any given time. So we get to go to a landowner and say, “This is how many you have? How many do you want? How many do you think will work?” And we get to constantly vary that based on rainfall and available feed. And like, you know, if that rancher is trying to grow three acres of lettuce, they obviously don’t want any deer there. But if that rancher is trying to pivot to regenerative ag with like, their cattle herds and how they’re like rotationally grazing, they have us working ahead of where they’re grazing so we don’t decide what the balance number is, but we provide the tool that allows that to happen, and it hasn’t happened yet, but we’re growing as quickly as we can to get there. Like the harvest system is one thing. Ecommerce is like holy crap. That’s…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Super complicated. So Hawaiian residents are able to? Is there a limit? How does that work for just a regular Hawaiian resident?

Jake Muise  

As an invasive species, there’s no bag limits, essentially. There’s no restrictions on where they can hunt on public land. So 20% of Maui is public land. There’s a lot of and there’s, well, it’s interesting, there’s a lot of Axis deer on those lands. But what was really cool about doing this survey, and the survey looks at like everything within like, two-meter increments, the lowest density population in that core 140,000 acres that we surveyed, Maui is about 465,000 acres. So we only surveyed a particular area, the lowest densities were in our public hunting areas. So those hunters are also really helping to balance populations as well in the areas that they’re able to. And so there’s no bag limits in those areas. And essentially, they can go any day of the year. They’re open all year round. So they’re having a net positive impact. Absolutely. In those areas.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And what is the acceptance of venison as a food source to Hawaiians? Because I know a lot of people think of Bambi and you know, the idea… I know very few people that actually eat venison. 

Jake Muise  

Yes and I think it’s really different on the different islands. So you can talk to somebody on Moloka’i that has had deer venison as a part of like, their life, but also like historically, for 100 plus years, and there’s nobody hungry on Moloka’i. That it is like entirely grained within the culture there that like they’re eating that instead of beef the vast majority of the time. Venison and nearshore fisheries are, they are very much a subsistence community. And I think that’s awesome. Probably very similar on Lanai. You can go talk to people on Maui. So Maui is – think about Maui is split into two sides. Maui has one giant mountain called Haleakalā, which is kind of the east side of Maui and on the west side of Maui, which is the West Maui mountain range, hardly has any deer yet and then Lahaina which is a really tourist like really popular tourist location has very, very few deer. You can talk to somebody in Lahaina, and they don’t even know that there’s deer on like on Haleakalā mountain, and so you take that one step further, and you talk to somebody on Oahu, and they’re like, “What! There’s deer on Maui?” So to answer your question, like it’s definitely place specific in the value of that animal and how its consumed. And then on like a North American scale, yeah, I think there when we introduced the idea of being able to eat a wild, invasive animal, like the vast majority, the reaction we got was, “Venison. Are you sure? Oh, I don’t know.” Like, there’s this general apprehension to try and get because they probably had Whitetail or Mule deer that are very gamey. And that’s usually like the first stumbling blocks for a lot of things. And then that’s, like, you know, that’s obviously not the case for Axis deer, which is interesting.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, so it did taste really different. I’m used to being given deer as a gift from hunter friends. And it is really strong. And I don’t know if that’s the breed or maybe the way that it was harvested, or you know, the age of the animal. So talk a little bit about how it tastes and the products that you’ve been making. And like, can you go to a grocery store in Hawaii and buy venison fresh? 

Jake Muise  

Not quite yet. We haven’t been able to build the scale to have like retail-ready, packaging, and all that. We’re almost there, which is really exciting. The vast majority of what you can purchase now is just directly online. But the taste profile, which is really interesting, and we’re just starting to understand the impact and both nutrient density but also flavor and taste from where they live. So some of the best coffee in the world comes from the same slopes. And we’re just starting to understand and again, you can speak to this better than me how soil health impacts the nutrition that the plants that they’re eating. Actually, we just got an amazing introduction to – oh my god, I’m gonna mess up his name. I’m gonna apologize in advance. I think is Dr. van Vliet at Utah State. So yeah, okay, so we get to be a part of that study he’s doing that’s looking at nutrient density. And, yeah, I think it’d be like a really cool comparison to beef. And again, like, our job isn’t to compare ourselves to beef. We’re just trying to have people eat more venison. So I think it’s great, like all the way around. But it’s clearly showing when he looked at the initial data, and he looked at said, Well, I think he said we had some of the most favorable omega three to six ratio profiles he’s seen across like all of his samples so far. And he said, it’s because of the soil. And so I think it’s really interesting. So when we come back to the idea of why does it taste the way it does, I think the first step is where it lives and how it lives. This animal is you said it the best – salad bar. It has an abundance of food, it’s able to, much to the dismay of our ranchers, it’s able to move to where the very best food is. So like eight-foot fences, like, they just jump straight over them. So they go and find the very, very best food on top of that, and I can only say this, like, anecdotally, I think they’re probably one of the most intelligent eaters I’ve ever seen. Like, I’ll see them walk down a fence line with the same plant species on both sides. They really like glycine, which is its high protein plant. And they’ll walk down the fence line, and they’ll be like smelling, smelling, and you think they’re just operating from such a place of abundance. They’re smelling, smelling, and then they’ll hop the fence line to eat the same plant on the other side of the fence. And I don’t know what that choice is, like, a banana is a banana to me. I think they’re just, I think they’re extremely intelligent animals. And I think that translates to their health. And then ultimately, their health, I think translates to how healthy they are to eat. And then I think one of the big ones are, and I think this started from a place where we like, we really love these animals. We designed all of our harvest systems to make sure they had no stress. So we do all of our work at night. We do it all with forward-looking infrared, which means like, there’s no visible light. They don’t know what’s going on. We don’t pen. We don’t bait. We don’t corral. We start every single night, not knowing where they are, essentially. We’re getting a little bit better with some of the like the drone technology that’s available, but we had the option to like, put them in a 30-acre corral. And A – it didn’t feel right. And B – we noticed like we did a couple of tests here and they were just like, ah, they get into rigor mortis so much faster and we could notice a difference in taste profile, and it wasn’t the right way to do it. So I think a combination of where they are, what they eat, and then ultimately how they die really impacts A, the way they taste, and B, I think their nutrient density for sure.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And I think for a lot of the people that follow me that were vegan or vegetarian, it’s the animal handling, that is one of the biggest problems, right, and I totally get it, like the idea of you know, of just raising animals in factories for protein is really disturbing. So this, to me seems like the most vegan meat possible.

Jake Muise  

We get a message about once a week that says like, I stopped eating red meat, because Cowspiracy, whatever, like whatever the choice is, and these people – it’s awesome. Like, I read this part of your webpage, or I saw this part of the video, and those pages are deep like they’re doing their research. And then they’re making the choice after 20 years, 15 years like to come back to eating red meat again. And it was –  you’re exactly right, it was specifically because of the humane handling of those animals. And then conversely, the complete opposite that with us, we don’t handle them at all. Like we’ll come over a hill and it’s complete darkness and they need to die immediately. We still have to follow all of the same USDA procedures that you would see in a brick and mortar. So like, not semi-graphic, but they need to be shot in the head and die immediately. And what’s really cool is if they’re under any stress, they just walk away. So we measure – we call them occurrences like every time we see deer in a given evening, only 50% of our occurrences result in us trying to harvest an animal. If they’re stressed out, they just walk away. And I think that’s a really cool way to start your food chain. Your food system starts right there is like, if the animal is under no stress, you have the opportunity to harvest that animal. If it is, then it walks away and it’s not a part of your evening, which I think is really cool.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, and it’s funny. So I just got back we were chatting before we got online. I just got back from a conference in London. And at the end, there was a vegan who raised her hand and sort of grilling me – how do I sleep at night and all these things. And she said, “Well, why not just let them die naturally?” And so I said, you know, “have you ever seen National Geographic? Because natural death is not just closing your eyes and going to sleep and never waking up again. It is very brutal.” And so what you’re describing here of basically sharpshooting in the middle of the night, when they have no idea that it’s coming is the most humane, possible way for anything.

Jake Muise  

Yeah. And I think then the intent of why that animal has to die, and its function within like our food systems. And like the reason then behind that action is also really important. It’s like, right, it’s impact to local food systems, its impact to the environment, but then when you stretch it out a little bit further, the impact of not balancing those populations, and an animal dying of starvation. I think a lot of it points to, I think of it as like responsible red meat. A lot of it points to there being like, very clear reasons why this animal has to get turned into food. So I have a lot of those same conversations with vegans. I’m very lucky, like, they all usually end really well. Because there aren’t a lot of huge, like, huge holes to poke in what we do. We’re trying to get better at everything we do. But yeah, we’re really proud of the work that we do. And I think, you know, like, we started with two guys. I almost made people put on name tags last week. We had, like 37 employees, and I’m just like, What is going on? What we’re building in this tool or solution, it’s also having like great impacts within our community. So there’s just a lot of really great reasons to help us eat this animal.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Tell me about your typical employee, what’s their background? How are they getting into this?

Jake Muise  

You know, it’s interesting, I used to have like a, I used to have like this, what I thought was like a job description, and I completely tossed it out. We’ve gone, we’ve converted completely back to where we want them to be hyper-local. We want them to be from that, like the areas that we’re managing. We want them to be as often as we can from that place. And it’s interesting when they come and they start to and the reason we made that decision is the people from those places want to take care of them more than anybody else. So when you look at the motivation of an employee, and all the different things that come into having like a great employee. As we learn to find them and build them, the people that are from those places always end up being the very, very best for our mission, because they want to take care of those places. And when they understand like the total impact of the work that they do. They arrive at 10 o’clock at night, every single night. Well, they’re arriving at like 945 ready to go. And then you can train them to be cool man, like, we need essentially sharpshooters, rally car drivers. So we’re out harvesting animals, but our slaughter facilities and stuff are centrally located. We have to like get them back as fast as they can. Many CrossFit athletes, you’re asking them to put like 210 pound animals on their back, carry them 200 plus yards. They then turn into processors and how they like handle them. And the interesting, like, you can’t leave a single hair left on that animal with the USDA. You have to ask somebody to be a CrossFit athlete, and then come back and in meticulous nature start like trimming hairs and everything else. And then when they’re done, they have to walk across and be a butcher, and know how to use a bandsaw. And so it’s extraordinary to take someone that has like next to no experience and like, teach them to do all of these different things. And we actually just had a new USDA doctor in last week.  She was somebody that had come in to fill in for somebody else. And she made the comment that she’s worked in lots of really, really large plants, where they have like 40 plus employees, and everybody just does essentially one motion. And there’s no like, there’s no interaction with these animals. And what’s really cool is one of our guys can go from carrying a deer on his back, just after the animal has died, to obsessing over like making sure there isn’t a single hair on it and the packaging and the label is square. They get to take it all the way from that harvest all the way to its last touch point before it goes to the customer. And they have like there’s a ton of pride in that for those guys. And it’s been awesome. And again, we started with like just bringing in lots of people that had lots of qualifications. And we landed at somebody that’s from that place that understands the impact that they have, and they’ve turned into our very, very best people.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Oh my gosh, that’s like I’m like welling up that is so, so great. I have been to many, many processing facilities and they don’t always seem like amazing places to work because it’s just you’ve got one person doing the same thing all the time, whether they’re on the kill floor or just in the, you know, freezing cold room butchering every single day under fluorescent lights all day long and what you just described sounds like one of the best jobs I’ve ever.

Jake Muise  

Well and but again, like, any job is still a job. It’s an amazing job, like, being able to like, take somebody and be like, Okay, you get to learn to be a rally car driver. And they’re like, what, like, they get so excited. But what really is the difference is they understand their impact. So a great like, single example is you stand on the slopes of Haleakala. And there’s the beautiful green, amazing slopes of all these amazing like, ranching communities. And you look down on the ocean, and what do you see you see all these like, condos and million-dollar houses and like, they’re like a virus taking over the beach and starting to like very gradually move up the hill. But what happens when –  hey, climate change is real? Like we’re getting we’re seeing significantly less rainfall. What happens when these marginal agricultural areas that only are even tougher to work in for our ranching community? What happens when they can’t do it? Because there’s too many deer and there’s not enough grass and there’s not enough rain? Well, what do they do? They’re gonna sell to make sure that their livelihood and they can support their cowboys. And that, like a virus, those houses crawl up the hill. And all of the people that we work with that are hyperlocal, they can, like they work on the hill every night, they can look down and see it, and they’re like, if I do my job really well, if we can achieve our mission, this country stays country. This place stays green. These places don’t crawl up the hill. And that’s one example of a lot of the ones we’ve talked about watersheds and reefs and food systems and importing 90% of our food, etc, etc, etc. When an employee – we are extremely fortunate, and that when an employee comes to work with us, and they understand all those things, you don’t have to convince them to be on time. You don’t have to convince them to like, operate well within a team. They are highly motivated when they understand all of those things.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Right. Right. Right. 

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Diana Rodgers, RD

So switching gears a little bit, let’s talk about some of the cool products you’re making. They’ve been sustaining me on my travels, the venison sticks, the texture is really great. They’re not too mushy, they’re not too salty. The flavor is on point.

Jake Muise  

That’s awesome. Again, like, we can’t do this unless we then create products that people want to eat. And luckily, they start from a place where they taste really good to start. I think we’re just starting to, I’m just starting to understand what the meat industry has to offer in that, like the amazing variety that you can produce. So we’ve started with like a lot of the basics and use lamb has like a backboard for cuts and everything else. But we’re starting to attract incredible talent like Brian Mayer, who you know, and like all these amazing people. They’re saying, like, well, we can, like Brian just made us a breakfast sausage. I was like, “What the hell?” Like it was so good. So we have, we do almost 99% of what we do is, is online, and we think of them as like, think of it as mission pricing, like we need those margins to grow our business and our mission. And we’re trying to create the variety that allow somebody to introduce venison to their household, convert their kid or whatever it is, and it’d be like, and then it stay there. So a lot of what we do is a subscription model as well. And so we have like a large variety of fresh cuts. We have some of the jerky that you’ve tried. We have bone broth, which amazing. Like the lab that did the bone broth called us the first time, it said like, they said we had adulterated the bones. And I was like, I don’t even know how you do that. But the bones tested 32% higher in protein per ounce than anything that they had done before. And so they were just really concerned with like the extremely high protein ratio. Yeah, so we’re just trying to figure out how many amazing different ways we can to like eat this animal. I mean, you were just talking about that amazing biltong. I’ll definitely send you some when we get the samples next week, but it has red wine vinegar added so it can be shelf-stable, and it has salt. And it’s amazing. We are so lucky that this animal tastes so good via diet, place, and process. But if it was, and I know lots of guys that love their Whitetail, but if this was like a white-tailed deer and it was extremely gamey and it tasted like bark, our mission would be the same. Our mission would still be trying to find amazing ways to eat this animal. We’re just really lucky that it does taste amazing. And we had somebody last week that is going to start using it for sushi. Yeah, it tastes so good raw. And luckily, the way it dies ultimately like affects its bacterial count. Like lactic acid uses I’m sure you’ve been to these plants and they like spray carcasses with lactic acid. Because our animals dying under no stress its lactic acid levels stay really high and then through rigor mortis lactic acid is an anti-microbial. That’s why they put it on carcasses. You can eat the venison raw, we don’t recommend it. I’m sure I’m supposed to make a disclaimer there or whatever that works. But it raw is amazing. Like ceviche and like being used for sushi. So it’s getting used across the entire spectrum of meat, which is so cool.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, and you’ve got and I haven’t dug into it only because this stuff, a lot of your stuff arrived right before I did a bunch of travel, but the organ blend that… so you’ve got a ground blend with a percentage of it as organ, which I always encourage people to get into for chilis or stews or whatever, because it’s just such a great way for those of us who I fully admit that straight liver for me, it’s really difficult. But in a blend…

Jake Muise  

We just realized after looking at a lot of that testing a lot of the especially in our liver and heart, the nutrient densities were so high. And we’re starting to work with a couple great nutritionists that -including our initial conversation with you, which was amazing, thank you, – it was so high that we were like, “wait , we can move the percentage of inclusion way down, it’s still so much of like the daily value of what you need.” So we actually just moved our organ blend to a 95/5. We might actually like bump it back to like a 98/2. And then like the 95/5 you can kind of barely taste like the irony tastes and like the 901/0 if you get like a chunk of liver in there somewhere, not certainly not at spaghetti or something. But then at 95/5, you can’t taste at all. Like, you cannot taste any of the organ inclusion. It tastes like regular ground, and you still get all of the great nutritional benefits of those organs. So that’s really exciting for us. How can we because same thing, I didn’t understand this. And now that we like are starting to understand like how important the B6 and B12 is, and all of those different things. I’m not a nutritionist. It’s really exciting. Selfishly, it’s most exciting, because now that’s all my kids eat after I understood it. But it’s really exciting to know that we, like Maui Nui can also help serve that purpose as well, which is really interesting. And something got really fun to figure out.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Right, because Hawaii has from – so my podcast producer, the woman who’s gonna be editing this, Emily, is an RD candidate and lives in Hawaii. And we were chatting just about the nutrition challenges facing communities in Hawaii right now. And so they need this really bad.

Jake Muise  

Yeah. Absolutely. One of the coolest things in getting to scale, we are just constantly reinvesting in what we do. We have like, maybe familiar with them, it’s a giant roll stock machine coming. It’s those things that make the perfectly square kind of look like those retail-ready packs, right. So we have one coming. And that means we can get into grocery stores. But one of the most exciting things we did is Kamehameha Schools, which educates all of like a lot, the vast majority are like our Hawaiian children – keiki. Ground is now replacing some of the beef on their menus. Then that – guess where that beef comes from? There isn’t enough ranchers to like support the amount of beef consumed in Hawaii. Either like we’re replacing beef that was coming from the continent. And we know is comparatively like hopefully a little bit healthier for them but comes from like right down the road. So there’s just so many exciting things when we look at as we grow, and our community of people grow with us, but being able to supply more locally, which is amazing. But most importantly, achieving our mission. Like, we have to harvest 15,000 deer a year to get ahead of reproductive capacity. Like we have to do it.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

So 15,000 deer a year, what does that look like on a weekly level on a nightly level? Like how often are you going out?

Jake Muise  

So we’ve had a really interesting scaling process. We started at and this also comes back to it having to be a USDA process. And that was a long process to get them to come along with us and they’re amazing. Don’t get me wrong. The people we work with are phenomenal. But we started in a place. We don’t get to grow incrementally. We have to like fit into a USDA schedule. So you basically we’re basically getting in chunks. So we started somewhere where it was three hours a night 12 days a month. Then we just moved to three hours a night 24 days of the month we were able to like grow two whole teams and being able to do everything. And then now we’re moving on the harvesting side. In the next couple of months we’ll be moving to six hours a night 24 days of the month, which will allow us to harvest about 50 to 65 deer at night, which puts us on target to be able to do anywhere from 12 to 15,000 deer a year.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Three hours to harvest and completely break down.

Jake Muise  

So the three-hour restriction is the three-hour restriction is to harvest and it has to be cleaned and in the chill. Yeah, so, and even then though, we cover on average 16 miles a night of travel to find enough deer. So when I say rally car driver, like, I mean it, these guys have to be able to operate at night moving very quickly. You don’t even like somebody gets out to like open a gate, and they are running. Everything – like there’s a very, very clear performance period that everything has to happen. And you start the night not knowing. So it’s, that was one of the hardest things to scale is. And we collected a crazy amount of data that helped us understand like, how many miles and where we need to go and all these different things. But to scale, a process that could deal with the variability of a wild animal was extremely complex. And so that’s we’ve been able to do that. And now we’re just replicating it across larger time periods and more people. And we’re really, really confident that by the end of this year, and looking into 2023, we’ll be able to get ahead of that population curve. And again, like you build all of these systems, and then like, you have to then go think about like, well, what does my email funnel look like? And I’m just like, Oh, my goodness, like E-commerce is… So I’ve learned a lot. I’ve luckily had some amazing people helped me learn. I always have books and homework and all these different things that need to be doing but, and to her credit, my wife is like everything you see every piece of packaging, everything that’s written everything like she is extraordinary.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

She’s your marketing person. She’s done a very, very good job.

Jake Muise  

Yeah and she obsesses over customer experience and all of those things. And if I hadn’t done that, I’d have done a much poor job, I’m sure, translating the nuance of what we need to do to a customer. And she’s, she’s amazing. She does a great job of that. And we have a great team now that helps us do a lot of those things. So yeah, it’s fun too. I don’t know a lot of other models that will take a raw material, they don’t have control over all the way to somebody’s door.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, right. Yeah, you’re vertically integrated. Mountain-ly integrated.

Jake Muise  

For sure. And, yeah, I don’t think we could do it any other way. Like, we want our employees to go all the way from carrying a deer to making sure that labels stay on square, thinking about how to discuss it with the customer. So yeah, it’s been a really fun journey to be able to put all those different things together. We’re really excited to see what it looks like, at larger scale, and that total impact of communities and ecosystems and briefs and all the different things we’ve talked about. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, well, I have a million ideas that I’ll share with you offline. But what an incredibly interesting job, you’ve had to go from being a hunter to growing this whole company. Because it’s not like it’s one thing to be a good hunter. But then to be a good manager of people, and to also be able to run an E-commerce business. And surround yourself with really smart people. What you’ve what is, it’s just remarkable. Let’s let everyone know how they can find you. Because you’ve got your website. It has a really great video showing, like the impact the deer have had with the I don’t know, not desertification. Just what would you call? 

Jake Muise  

Just denuding landscapes. Yeah, yeah, just that caught. Like, that video definitely focuses on sediment, watersheds, and a lot of different things.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

But also shows the whole process of the excitement of going out and harvesting too, which is really cool.

Jake Muise  

Yeah. And so that’s available on our website, under the mission portion of our website. And the website is just mauinuivenison.com. And the vast majority of what we do lives on that website, and all of the information to harvesting and nutrition and a bunch of other things are available there as well.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And then I’m going to make you do a plug for your Instagram account

Jake Muise  

Maui Nui Venison at something else, I also don’t touch, which is a benefit to everybody. So Ku’u and Jordan handle that, and they’re great about getting back to people with questions and all kinds of different things. And there’s a lot of educational content there. And then there’s a lot of incredible recipes. We have an amazing culinary team that like we just have ideas coming from all over the place. After somebody gets like the idea of taste profile. They’re like, “Oh, I can do anything with this like really?” So we have some great recipes there as well. Really good resources to make sure customers are successful with venison.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Well, I’ll be following everything you guys are doing. Wishing you the best of luck and hoping that I can get down. You know, there’s a few groups in Hawaii now that I’d like to visit with. So I’m hoping to do something. And I really would love to see this process firsthand. And again, I’m just so impressed with what you guys are doing just all of it just from the ego side to the meat side to the product side. All of it is just fantastic. So congratulations.

Jake Muise  

Thank you very much. That invitation is wide open. Whenever you make your way to Maui, we’d love to have you for sure.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, and have a great day.

Jake Muise  

You too. Thank you so much.

Diana Rodgers, RD  28:30  

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