It’s a bit surprising, but not too hard for some people to believe, that Cody Marburger, the chief executive officer of Round Rock, Texas-based Nolan Ryan Brands had every intention of being a lawyer before he stepped into a career in the beef industry.

Cody is a native Texan, born in Round Top, a small rural town about halfway between Houston and Austin. He was one of just 16 people in his high school’s graduating class in 2008, in a community peppered with cow-calf producers and now is perhaps most popular for hosting antique festivals twice a year. Like most families in the area, the Marburgers raised cattle when he and his younger brother were growing up, and they both were active in FFA and 4-H. Given his upbringing, it wasn’t a surprise that Marburger developed a passion for livestock judging. He also played sports but in between games and practices he stayed busy showing cattle and pigs and traveling to shows around the state.

His work ethic and desire to succeed, which he said were instilled by his parents, were the foundation for his future career. 

“I’m somebody who has always had lofty and big goals and they kind of pushed and encouraged me to think that way and always supported me,” he said.

That encouragement and moral support continued after high school, as Marburger attended Blinn College, a junior college near his hometown, and continued judging livestock. He said it was a good stepping stone for him as he transitioned from a small community and set his academic sights on attending one of the state’s biggest universities, Texas A&M. The bonds and friendships he formed through his participation in livestock judging at Blinn made a big impression on him and he still is in contact with many of those people today. Once he enrolled at A&M in 2010, Marburger’s two goals were to work at the university’s Beef Center and to be a part of the livestock judging team, both of which he achieved. As part of the livestock judging team, he was able to travel across the country and meet new people with similar interests and visit ranches and livestock facilities that he never would have been exposed to otherwise.

Formative years

But those activities also bolstered Marburger’s work ethic and pursuit of success.

“Those days were long, they were hard. There were a lot of sacrifices when you would give up going out on a Thursday night or you missed certain weekend events or football games because you were with a team traveling, competing somewhere — you were just learning in a different way.”

But despite his passion for working with livestock, Marburger said his degree in animal science was just part of his academic journey that would end with him working as an attorney.

“Up until probably the spring semester of my senior year, I was planning to go to law school,” he said, adding that at that point he had already taken the LSAT and making good grades as un undergraduate was part of a goal that was years in the making.

“I had a very clear kind of path and vision,” he said. “And then I was getting a bit of ‘senior-itis’ and I wasn’t so sure that three more years of school sounded so great.”

It was during that final semester that Marburger’s livestock judging coach notified him of a job opening at National Beef that he thought would be a great first job opportunity for him. While initially not enamored with the idea of not pursuing his law school plan, Marburger went ahead and accepted the interview invitation at the company’s headquarters in Kansas City, Mo.

Almost as soon as he walked in the building he realized there was plenty for him to learn about the beef business.

“You spend so much time being a part of a judging team and going to shows and focusing on animal science at one of the best schools in the country, and you feel like you know a lot about the industry,” he said, but during that interview, his attitude shifted. After getting a glimpse of the inner workings of a company on the scale of National Beef, he realized that he didn’t know how much he didn’t know.

“My eyes kind of popped out of my head from the standpoint of, ‘Wow, there’s so much more here than I could have ever imagined,” he said, and his interest was more than a little piqued.

Ultimately he accepted the job and in 2012, took the plunge of living well outside of his East-Central Texas bubble.

“It was a chance to branch out,” he said of launching into the beef industry and relocating to the Midwest.

During a stint of just under two years working in cattle procurement at National, Marburger said he was able to use what he learned to advance his career.

“I saw the industry segmentation through a lens that I never would have before,” he said, including how what happens on the cattle side fits in with the beef side; how government plays a role; the complexities of all the different customer segments and much more.

“It gave me a great foundation to learn from and being a part of a big company like that, in a corporate office, gave me a network of so many different resources and individuals around me to pick their brains,” Marburger said.

He also realized through that experience how he could learn the personalities and traits of leaders he wanted to emulate in his career as well as those he didn’t want to be like.

Traveling to and touring beef plants and feedyards and riding along in pick-up trucks watching cattle buyers do their craft gave Marburger a new perspective and appreciation for all the moving, interrelated parts of the industry and the people who dedicated their careers to it.

“It filled in a lot of gaps that I probably, at that point, would have never known existed.”

Looking back, Marburger said he was excelling in his role and was getting recognized and rewarded by the people he worked for, including his direct boss at the time, Chad Barker, who was one of those inspirational leaders he aspired to be like one day.

“I really liked what I was doing there,” Marburger said of his time at National. “But I kind of had this longing and this desire to move back to Texas. And I wasn’t sure that, long term, a big company was necessarily what I was wired to be a part of.”

Opportunity knocks

While not actively in the job market and still working at National, Marburger received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter hiring for a sales position at Nolan Ryan Beef, which he saw as a significant departure from his cattle procurement background.

“Sales wasn’t really in my DNA,” he said, but he also didn’t want to rule the opportunity out, and the company was based in Texas, so he scheduled an interview.

At that time, in 2013, the company was still fairly small with plenty of growth opportunity. As a company, Nolan Ryan was, and still is, a sharp contrast to National Beef. Nolan Ryan is an asset-light company in everything it does; it utilizes co-manufacturers and uses third-party distributors and logistics companies. It operates more like a sales and marketing and management company for a network of beef producers that meet the Nolan Ryan Brands’ production practices and meat quality.

After the interview Marburger was surprisingly enthusiastic about the opportunity as he made the trek back to Kansas City, only to find out a few days later that the job was offered to another applicant. As fate would have it, in the next few weeks he was contacted again by someone at Nolan Ryan about another open position, this one for an operations manager.

He accepted that offer in the fall of 2013, recalling, “That was probably a better fit for me anyway.”

During the first few years, Marburger focused on operations and later managed the supply chain side of the business. At the time the company only employed about 11 people and many of the senior leaders of the company were in the later stages of their careers. He saw this as an opportunity to learn about multiple parts of the business and benefit from the exposure of wearing many hats as he worked to identify where he fit in best and how he could add the most value. Fortunately, some of those seasoned leaders saw a spark in Marburger.

“They were willing to kind of pour into me to develop and get what they could out of that potential.”

He said the perspective he gained during his time at National proved to be valuable in his role at Nolan Ryan Brands.

“ I rely on that [experience] to think about, ‘OK, when I’m working with our vendors like a Cargill or like a JBS or somebody, how are they going to be thinking? What does this mean for their business?’ And I try to approach situations that way and it doesn’t matter if you’re talking to somebody in sales, or you’re talking to somebody in procurement, it gives you a different lens or perspective on how to approach some of those conversations.”

When he joined the company there was just one brand and it was Nolan Ryan Beef. That brand has been exclusively sold by Kroger since the early 2000s, which is a partnership that nearly spans the lifetime of the company as it celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

After about two years at the company, Marburger, while still in his mid-20s, was promoted to director of operations, and in 2017 advanced again to chief operating officer. After four years in that role, he moved up the ranks again and was named president in 2021 and then CEO in March 2022.

As he has moved up the corporate ladder, Marburger has maintained a ‘keep calm and carry on’ work mentality, which has served him well.

“I’m not one of those real loud, rah-rah leaders,” he said. “I’m pretty even-keeled and poised, and it doesn’t matter if we’re having a great day or a terrible day, you know which version of me you’re going to get,” he said.

During his tenure, Marburger overhauled the supply chain at Nolan Ryan Brands, stabilizing the business and eliminating a lot of its operational risks. Those changes directly correlate to the company’s growth since he has been in executive roles. In his quest for continuous improvement, Marburger decided to go back to school to earn a master’s in business administration. He achieved that goal in 2022 after completing an online program through Colorado State University while maintaining his leadership role at the company. 

“That was another really impactful point in my career and in my journey,” he said, “because it helped me to shore up a lot of my financial skills and things that would be needed for this role. It also helped me to think about the world of strategic marketing in an entirely different way.”

He is energized by serving as a player-coach type of leader and looks forward to facing daily challenges head on and working with others on his team to think through problems and help them find solutions. Building his team and developing their skills is a point of pride for Marburger.

“Bringing a lot of entry level or very early career people onto the team and [developing] them and just seeing the growth that they’ve had either here or if they’ve gotten a better job opportunity to move up into a bigger role somewhere else, that’s been pretty rewarding and cool to see,” he said.

Growing opportunities

While the company’s bread and butter has been its decades-long partnership with Kroger, which grew to represent about 90% of the business for most of its first 20 years, it was clear that diversifying the business was going to be essential to keep it viable for the decades ahead. Unfortunately, the exclusivity agreement with Kroger prevented the company from working with other retailers and it hindered opportunities to sell to restaurants.

“We were kind of running into a wall on the foodservice side of things,” Marburger said. “They wanted something different on their menu, not something you could go down the street and buy from Kroger.”

Faced with the challenge, Marburger and the previous CEO hatched the idea of launching a second brand. In 2019, the duo executed their vision by developing the Goodstock by Nolan Ryan brand, which launched in 2020, at about the same time the pandemic ramped up. To help promote the brand and its high-quality products, in 2020, the company opened an 1,800-square-foot retail boutique butcher shop in Round Rock, Texas, to showcase the products. An e-commerce site was also used to promote the brand and generate sales.

“We wanted it to feel like there was a place where people could go, and they could connect, and foodservice operators were buying from this centralized place until we could build kind of a brand life or brand story of its own,” he said.

 However, at the end of 2024, the decision was made to close the butcher shop. Marburger said it served its purpose in helping to launch the Goodstock brand and build its story, but the resources could be used in other growth areas.

Initially, the Goodstock brand was heavily marketed to the barbecue segment, including competition teams, which led to opportunities to supply many barbecue restaurants, which pepper the culinary landscape of Central Texas.

“We went from selling very few briskets to selling several million pounds of briskets now.”

The Goodstock brand journey has diversified beyond barbecue and beyond Texas borders as a partnership with Princess Cruise Lines puts the premium beef on plates served to travelers on the high seas.

Marburger’s vision for the future of Nolan Ryan Brands includes potential acquisitions and building a wide-ranging portfolio.

“I see us being a Purdue or a Hormel or a company like that where we’ve got a house of brands, likely protein brands, but not necessarily. I’m open and flexible to exactly what that looks like.”

He added that he wouldn’t be surprised if in the coming decade, Nolan Ryan Brands grew to include as many as six brands under its banner.

“We’re looking for other kinds of early-stage brands that have probably outgrown their founder or maybe outgrown that first rendition of a management team but need to be professionalized; need to be run more efficiently,” Marburger said. “We think that we could bolt those onto our business and do a pretty nice job at that.”

Family matters

Currently, Nolan Ryan Brands’ products are sourced by about a dozen different processors, with Cargill as its primary packing partner. Among those 12, the company works weekly with about six processors consistently. It also works with a small network of further processors, including Lone Star Meats that does Nolan Ryan’s portion control steak cutting. Other partners, like Caviness Beef Packers in Amarillo, produce ground beef patties for the company and Buckhead Meat produces some of its other portion cutting and marinated products. For about the past five years, the customer mix has shifted to about 25% to 30% foodservice, with growth in that segment this past year of around 50%, and the Goodstock foodservice brand has grown to being on the menus of 350 restaurants. But the bulk of its business is still dominated by Kroger.

While Marburger and his team look to grow and diversify the company moving ahead, sales have continued to grow at a double-digit clip the past several years, to about $200 million per year.

“This year we’ll probably move about 30 million pounds of beef,” he said.

A privately held company, Nolan Ryan Brands operates as a limited partnership, with a board of directors and about 35 shareholders. The Hall of Fame pitcher, his two sons and his son-in-law are four of the board members with his youngest son, Reese, serving as the chairman. The family maintains offices just next door to the beef company’s location and Nolan, who has been active in ranching for decades, stays in the know about the status of the business.

“Genuinely, this is a passion of his,” he said. “They (the family) have a lot of assets and investments that they’re involved in, but this is the only one with his name on it.”

Marburger said Ryan routinely will ask about accounts the company supplies and checks in on customers, salespeople and the health of the business.

“He has that level of awareness and he really cares. A big part of what’s kept me here so long and will continue to likely keep me here is the family, their commitment, their passion and how much they care for the business.”