Chapter 146.1 – Teahouse
An Zi Ran and Fu Wu Tian didn’t know what happened at the Chamber of Commerce meeting.
At this time, they had just arrived at the small farm in the suburbs.
The gathering was held in a large and well-known restaurant in Jun Zi City. Rumor has it that the restaurant belonged to the Zhuo family. The restaurant’s location was very close to Prince Fu’s Mansion, and Fu Yi arrived at the destination quickly.
Knowing that An Zi Ran and Fu Wu Tian were coming, the cattle rancher had been waiting for them by the door ahead of time.
The reason the cattle rancher was so anxious was because Bao Hua Gambling House deliberately chose the beginning of the month to implement their suppression tactics.
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The output of fresh meat that the cattle rancher’s slaughterhouse produced was a sizeable amount, and the beginning of the month was the time when he got the most customers. Therefore, the slaughterhouse generally prepared the meat for the beginning of next month at the end of the month in advance, so the accumulation of meat was also the largest at this time.
Bao Hua Gambling House was targeting this point, so they chose to attack at the beginning of the month.
The cattle rancher did not expect them to do something like this, because breaking a contract would cost a lot of money. His situation was not comparable to Li Zhen’s situation from back then. Li Zhen only had a small-scale workhouse, but his slaughterhouse has been open for more than a decade.
Most of the customers were old acquaintances. Because they trusted him, the contracts they signed with him were mostly over five years long, even the shortest one was two years long.
Not all of his customers defaulted on their contracts, but some of the customers who defaulted were unexpectedly long-time customers of more than five years.
The cattle rancher thought that Bao Hua Gambling House wouldn’t go this far, so he didn’t take any extra precautions, but in the end he still fell into their trap. With so much fresh meat accumulated, the loss would be insurmountable.
“How is the situation?”
An Zi Ran did not bother to exchange pleasantries. As soon as he saw the cattle rancher, he got straight to the point without beating around the bush.
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The cattle rancher explained: “There aren’t that many people that defaulted, but the ones that did ordered a lot of meat. With these people defaulting on their contracts, half of the meat in the slaughterhouse will be left unsold, and I can’t find enough customers to purchase the meat in such a short time.”
“How many catties of meat are left?” An Zi Ran asked.
[T/N: The weight of one catty differs slightly from place to place. In China, it is 500 grams. In Taiwan it is 600 grams. In Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, one catty is slightly over 604 grams.]
“I estimated nearly thirteen thousand catties of meat leftover.”
The cattle rancher’s slaughterhouse could slaughter up to forty or fifty cattle a month. If one cow weighed one thousand catties, then it could produce four hundred to six hundred catties of meat. So in a month, they could get about twenty-six thousand catties of meat. And that was just a conservative estimate. If it was during the peak period, then they could reach up to thirty-six catties of meat.
It was impossible to sell so much meat all at once, especially since some of the cattle have already been slaughtered. The fresh meat from the cattle could not be kept for too long.
The cattle rancher really had no other solution, and that was why he turned to An Zi Ran and Fu Wu Tian for help.
An Zi Ran thought for a while and then he said, “How about this? However much meat you have left, I will buy it all.”
The cattle rancher stared at him in shock, “But, but with so much meat, you…”
It’s not that the cattle rancher wanted to doubt An Zi Ran, but the amount of meat was really too much. Even if the average person could afford to buy so much meat all at once, it was difficult for them to turn around and sell the meat in a short amount of time, not unless the selling price was lower than the market price.
An Zi Ran stopped him and said, “You just have to sell the meat to me. I will handle the rest.”
“Okay, then.”
The price of beef was eighteen copper coins per catty, which was the wholesale price. However, the thirteen thousand catties of meat were not all beef. Some of it was pork. The quality of pork from the cattle rancher was better than that of other slaughterhouses, so the price was relatively high, which was twenty-two copper coins per catty.
In this way, the total price of thirteen thousand catties of meat was two hundred and forty taels of silver. This was after the cattle rancher rounded out the price.
For An Zi Ran, spending this sum of money did not make his heart ache or itch.
But finding a destination for all this meat really was a bit of a hassle.
After discussing with Fu Wu Tian, they decided to send some of the meat to An Yuan County first. The daily amount of meat that the An family’s multiple restaurants needed was not a small number, and the journey was not particularly far. As long as the meat was well frozen, it would not spoil in a day.
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For the rest of the meat, An Zi Ran planned to turn them into beef jerky. The incident happened too suddenly, and finding new buyers would take too much time, so he thought of making the meat into beef jerky, which would be easy to store. And he already knew where to send the beef jerky. He assigned this task to Zhou Lao Han’s daughter-in-law and Chef Wang.
The two of them had followed An Zi Ran to the capital, but because the restaurant was still in the middle of construction, they had nothing to do yet, so in their spare time they created new recipes together. As it turned out, they came up with a lot of great dishes, and the ones who got to enjoy these culinary delights were the people in Prince Fu’s Mansion.
An Zi Ran would occasionally provided them with some inspiration.
