- Martin Cole "Tug" Nay
- Nay's Meats
- Panguitch
70 years of serving Garfield County's farmers and ranchers
Nay’s Meats is a fifth-generation custom slaughter and meat processing facility located in Panguitch. They have been serving the farmers’ and ranchers’ needs in the Garfield County area for the past 70 years. Martin Cole "Tug" Nay returned to Panguitch after attending two semesters of college at Utah Valley University in hopes of taking over the family business. In 2012, Tug’s father, Martin Nay, got severely sick, which led to Tug buying the family business at the age of 24.
Martin and Tug were best friends and Tug admired his dad greatly. Martin was chief of police, justice of the peace and owner and operator of a Subway sandwich shop, and he worked side-by-side with his father at Nay’s Meats before he bought the family business. Tug would accompany Martin to work every day and learned the valuable trade of butchering.
Since Tug purchased the business, he has focused on growth for both Nay’s Meats and the farmers and ranchers he serves. Nay’s Meats has now expanded to serve an entire regional area as opposed to just Garfield County. They have acquired customers from Southern Nevada, Northern Arizona and Northern Utah. Their philosophy is to provide the end consumer with a lower processing cost while giving the producer maximum profit.
Tug has worked with the local Small Business Development Center in Cedar City and has hired four full-time employees in the past year. They recently applied for and were awarded the USDA Meat & Poultry Inspection Readiness Grant. With those funds, personal funds and a bank loan, Tug is expanding his existing facility into a federally inspected meat processing facility. This will allow the company to hire five to 10 more full-time employees. It is often hard to find well-paying jobs in rural areas of Utah and Tug takes great pride to make sure his employees have a livable wage which helps not only their families but also the community. His aggressive pay scale often pays 130 percent of the average county wage. The upgraded processing facility will also allow Nay’s Meats to offer more services to their customers.
Nay’s Meats truly believes there is no better source to find farm-to-table freshness. The ranchers and farmers in this area provide a second-to-none product and the company is instrumental in facilitating the needs of the consumers from the producers while eliminating the “middleman box shops.” Becoming a USDA federally inspected facility will now provide local ranchers and farmers the opportunity to market not only to private consumers, but to local restaurants and grocers.