An Inspired Chat with Spencer & Britney Hess

We recently had the chance to connect with Spencer & Britney Hess and have shared our conversation below.

Spencer & Britney, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What is a normal day like for you right now?
Our days start bright and early. Usually around 5:00 to 5:30 AM and like any good day, it begins with the most essential fuel: coffee. While Spencer heads out to feed our animals, Britney gets breakfast going and wrangles the kids for the day ahead. By 6:30, we’re in the processing room and ready to get to work. Spencer starts on the bandsaw while Britney organizes and boxes up the frozen cuts from the day before. Spencer wraps up the bandsaw work around 10:30, and Britney usually finishes packaging by 11:00. Then it’s time for the whole crew, including our son Clayton, to team up on deboning and grinding. Clayton runs the grinder, Britney handles packaging, and Spencer does a bit of everything: getting the bandsaw broke down for cleaning, refilling the grinder, hauling finished boxes to the freezer, and loading up the stuffer. Most days, we’re wrapped up in the shop by 2:30 or 3:00. We regroup with a quick snack and talk through the evening plan. Evenings are spent out with the cattle — feeding, checking waters, and making sure mineral is topped off. Clayton handles feeding at home and milking our cow Goldie, while Spencer gets the processing room prepped again after our amazing cleaning crew (a hard-working mother-daughter duo) deep cleans from the day’s work. Britney gets dinner on the table, and after we eat, we head outside for a little fun. Scooters, biking, and backyard football are a few of the kids’ favorites before we wind down with baths and bedtime. We hit the pillow tired but grateful, ready to do it all over again.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Hi! We’re the Hess family the team behind AN Cattle Custom Processing & Meat, a small family-run business based in rural Arizona. We raise cattle, process meat, and work side-by-side as a family every day to provide high-quality processing and locally raised beef and pork to families across the state.
Our name, AN, is a nod to Britney’s grandfather and the original family cattle brand. Reviving it is our way of honoring the legacy he built and giving it new life with a modern twist. While the methods have evolved, the values remain the same: hard work, honesty, and respect for the animals and the land.
What makes us unique? We do it all ourselves from feeding and caring for our animals to processing, packaging, and distributing the final product. Our small, hands-on operation means we know exactly what goes into every cut, and we take pride in offering food we would feel good about feeding our own family.
We’re passionate about transparency, doing things the right way, and giving people a deeper connection to their food. Whether you’re buying a quarter beef share or using our custom processing services, you’re supporting a family who truly cares and loves the work we do.
Right now, we’re focused on expanding our fall availability for shares of meat and connecting more Arizona families with quality meat they can trust. As well as opening more availability for processing services.

Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What relationship most shaped how you see yourself?
The relationship that’s shaped how we see ourselves the most is the one we have with each other. That might be cheesy but it is definitely true. We’ve been together since high school really growing up side by side through every season of life: military service, starting a family, chasing new adventures, and ranching and running a business together. We’ve learned a lot along the way about who we are, resilience, patience (with life and each other), and what it really means to build something together from the ground up. Through long days, big decisions, and more than a few “figure it out as we go” moments, we’ve grown into who we are as individuals, as a couple, and now as a team raising kids and running AN Cattle Company. Our relationship is the foundation of everything we do and it’s what keeps us grounded when life gets busy, unpredictable, or flat-out hard. We all know life can be hard. We’re not perfect, but we’re better together. And we truly wouldn’t have it any other way.

What did suffering teach you that success never could?
When Spencer was diagnosed with a brain tumor everything changed. The long days, the business goals, the endless to-do lists, they suddenly didn’t matter the way they used to. What mattered was time with the ones we love the most, making memories to last us a lifetime. Suffering taught us that life is so short, too short to spend it doing something you don’t love, too short to not be present, and far too short to take the simple things for granted. We learned to lean hard on God and to trust that even in the darkest moments, He was working things for good. We found strength we didn’t know we had and clarity we didn’t know we needed. Success may bring pride and progress, but suffering? Suffering brought perspective. It reminded us that relationships come first. Health is a gift. Joy can be found even in the hardest places, especially when you’re surrounded by love. Britney’s Grandfather loved to say, “you don’t have to, you get too” and that really became our motto. While suffering is difficult to endure there is no alternative and if you embrace it, you have the opportunity to reveal the purest form of love and appreciation for all that you have.

So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
We really think the industry too often glorifies profit over people. Somewhere along the way, the top of the chain forgot that this isn’t just about how many ribeye steaks they can send out, it’s about feeding families, stewarding the land, and doing right by the animals and the people who make it all possible. Ranchers across the nation are families like ours most often with generations of loving the animals and land just trying to make a living doing what they know and love.

That the average consumers don’t care about where their food comes from, or that they want convenience over everything. The truth is that people do care. Most just don’t realize it is accessible to them to purchase directly from a rancher. That there is an alternative to purchasing their meat from their local supermarket. Just because that has been mostly removed from their daily lives over time. There are so many grassroot efforts to connect consumers to their local ranchers to get their freezers filled with locally raised meat and that is something worth celebrating in this industry.

Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: What is the story you hope people tell about you when you’re gone?
First and foremost, we hope it’s said that we were fiercely devoted parents, the kind who showed up, loved hard, and raised our kids with an abundance of love, faith, and open hearts. That our love for each other was loud, constant, and unshakable, a love that weathered life’s storms and celebrated all the small wins along the way. We hope people remember that we weren’t afraid to chase the hard things, that we leaned into challenges instead of running from them, and built something lasting with our own two hands. That we believed in doing things the right way, even when it wasn’t the easy way. We hope they’ll tell stories about Spencer’s relentless humor and legendary pranks. That they’ll still talk about Britney’s cooking and how it was the kind that makes you feel at home. More than anything, we hope our story is one of faith and love. That we lived fully, loved deeply, and left behind a family and a life we were proud of.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ancattle.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ancattleco?igsh=OXl5eXVzcWc2MDli
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ancattleco?mibextid=ZbWKwL

Image Credits
Family pictures by Alexis Mahan, A.R.S Photos