This cowboy got rich selling veggie burgers. Here’s how

To see the future of food, look no further than Sam Cobb, the cattle rancher making soy-based Boca Burgers.

[Photos: LikeMeat/Unsplash; Shamblen Studios/Unsplash]

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Source NM.

The first thing Andy Barrientes noticed when he showed up for his shift at RMS Foods on Valentine’s Day in 2005 was the cloud of black smoke emanating from the building. 

A fire had started in the factory around 4:20 p.m., not long before Barrientes was scheduled to clock in as maintenance manager at the food manufacturing plant in southeastern New Mexico. The blaze had caught his coworkers coming off the day shift by surprise; they reported smelling the smoke before seeing the flames. When Barrientes arrived, he saw the staff huddled together at the park across the street. “Everyone was holding hands,” he said. “And we were just … the fire was so big.”

Barrientes had only been working at the factory for a few years. The job was something of an odd one: RMS Foods had once been a prominent meat processor in Hobbs, New Mexico, supplying local hotels and restaurants with cuts of beef and pork. But the company had recently started producing soy-based veggie burgers under the Boca Burger brand — an unlikely pivot for a part of the country better known for its cattle ranches, steakhouses, and dairy farms. Barrientes was hired around the same time as this change, and in the years since, veggie burger production had taken off. 

On the day of the fire, the entire staff evacuated without injuries, allowing the fire department — which arrived within four minutes of receiving the call — to immediately set to work containing the inferno. 

By 5:30 p.m., the clouds of smoke had mostly dissipated, but the building was gone. The roof of the factory had collapsed, and all but three pieces of food-processing equipment were damaged beyond repair.

Among those standing across the street in the middle of Humble Park were Sam Cobb, president of RMS Foods, and his wife, Rhonda. Cobb’s father had founded the company 46 years prior, and the plant had been standing proudly on North Grimes Street for nearly as long. The family business all but burned to the ground in about an hour. Cobb, who had taken over after working under his father for years, promptly began thinking about how to support his employees in the face of such a loss, but he had few details for what came after that. “We’ll assess the damages and see what we can do to get back in business,” he told a local reporter for the Hobbs News-Sun.

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