The Mission of Motley Crew Marketplace

The Motley Crew Ranch story begins with the first dates of Marko Alexandrou and Cassidy Ugles. The California-born, Greece-raised Alexandrou — then an academic working on his postdoc at UCSB — was incredulous when friends told him that Ugles, who’s from Bainbridge, Washington, liked to spearfish and hunt.

They met an Industrial Eats, and the connection was instantaneous. “We were both passionate about food, the outdoors, cooking, and where our food comes from,” said Alexandrou. 

They decided to go to Anacapa Island to freedive off of his boat. “We shot some yellowtail, brought them back, and made sushi,” he said. “Then we went boar hunting. She was skinning and gutting a wild pig with me. She could handle herself, clearly.”

A year ago, after a decade of raising all sorts of animals for meat on their Highway 246 property near Lompoc, the couple opened Motley Crew Marketplace, a proper butcher shop just off the 101 in Buellton. Though it functions as a store for hand-cut meat, fresh seafood, pantry items, and more, the marketplace is really more about a mission.

“My interest is to be a hub for local farmers to be able to market their product at fair prices and to give people opportunities that we didn’t have when we started,” said Alexandrou. “We have enough farmers locally that we should be able to support something like that.”

His path to butcherdom must be unique for the trade. His mom was a professor at UC Irvine when he was born, but he was just 4 years old when the family moved back to Greece, where his dad still works as an architect. He earned degrees in marine and evolutionary biology, ecology, and genetics at universities in Santa Cruz, London, and Wales before coming to UCSB, where his interest in academia waned. “I just got tired of it,” said Alexandrou. “It wasn’t fulfilling for me.”

He also wasn’t satisfied with American lamb. “I’m used to eating lamb in Greece,” he said. “I couldn’t find nice quality lamb that I liked.” 

Once together with Ugles, they leased a ranch and started raising chicken, rabbits, goats, pigs, cows, quail, and, yes, lamb. “We tailored them to our taste through breeding,” said Alexandrou, who left academia around that time to consult on endangered species at Vandenberg.

Motley Crew Ranch’s meat was popular, especially with restaurants. “Everyone wanted some, and we preferred doing that than our other jobs,” said Alexandrou, explaining that Ugles was working in the Dierberg tasting room when they quit in 2016. “We decided we’d rather work for ourselves and do something we believe in. We just took a giant leap and made it happen.”

When COVID killed the restaurant business, they pivoted to selling more direct-to-consumer, mostly via monthly subscriptions. (There was also a brief flash of the marketplace in the back of Industrial Eats in 2022.) But it turns out that selling locally raised meat in Santa Barbara County is a logistical nightmare. 

Due to state regulations requiring any commercially sold mammal to be certified by the USDA — a rule many other states do not have — any cows, goats, pigs, sheep, or other mammals raised here must be shipped up to one of two meat processing facilities in Paso Robles. (There’s hope that the Lompoc prison may one day become certified, but that’s been in the works for years. Read all about these issues here.) 

“We have to take animals far and wide for them to be harvested and cut and packaged. Then we get them back frozen and often not at the specs we would like,” said Alexandrou. The process is extremely expensive, adds to the carbon footprint, and stresses out the animals unnecessarily. “Being able to control that part of the process is an essential thing for the food system to be able to thrive locally.”

Alexandrou streamlined some of that for Santa Barbara County folks who raise animals, from 4H projects to larger cattle operations. He will pay for the processing and pick up the finished meats in his own van, so long as the ranchers get their animals to Sinton & Sons in Creston. “That works for most farmers pretty well,” he said. “We offer a price that’s higher than what they could get from auction. It’s worth it to them.”

Once the animals come back to the marketplace — many are whole, though the five cows they go through monthly come quartered — they are thrown in the freezer for extended aging or broken down as needed. “We can basically cut anything people like, which is fun,” said Alexandrou, who even did some special Danish cuts of pork for the holidays last year, popular with Solvang’s Danes. “We’re more of a butcher shop than any of the local grocery stores. The other guys are meat slicers. We are actually butchering. There’s not a lot of people who do that anymore.”

A commercial fisherman himself, Alexandrou is particularly proud to bring a steady supply of seafood to the Santa Ynez Valley. “We feel like it’s been sorely missing from the equation,” he said of the valley’s historic lack of fishmongers. “We’re lucky to live next to the Channel Islands. They have one of the richest fisheries in the United States.” He catches some himself, but mostly buys from 805 Seafood.

There are also 25 flavors of sausage and various ground meats, and a growing line of prepared items such as pot pies, quiches, roasted chickens, shepherd’s pie, and a whole slew of sides for Thanksgiving and the upcoming holidays. That’s thanks to the help of Steve Dobozy, the R&D chef from Bell’s in Los Alamos who also works full-time at the marketplace. “He’s a real pro, a true gem,” said Alexandrou. “We’re super lucky to have him.” 

Sandwiches are coming soon, and then there’s bread, rice, beans, tinned fish, cheese, charcuterie — basically everything you need to make a restaurant-level dinner at home, or just to pop a picnic in a vineyard. 

The Alexandrous are still adjusting to spending much more time in the close confines of Motley Crew Marketplace than they are on the 10 acres of Motley Crew Ranch. “It’s definitely not as busy as when we were raising 12 species, everything from cows to the quail,” said Alexandrou of the ranch. He hopes that will change one day if they can afford to buy their own land rather than lease like they do now.  

Thankfully, the marketplace is already working. “It’s better than I thought,” admitted Alexandrou. “Being net positive in the first year? I’m okay with that.” 

Motley Crew Marketplace, 225 McMurray Rd., Ste. F, Buellton; (805) 325-6274; motleycrewmarket.com