Our Story

A Family Business

Joyce Farms was started in 1962 by Alvin Joyce and is still a family-owned business today, with Alvin’s son, Ron Joyce, and his two sons, Ryan and Stuart, at the helm. We are located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and most of our partner farms are also located in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. Joyce Farms has come a long way since the company was founded in 1962. We’ve gone from just selling chickens to raising the very best all-natural poultry, beef and game for the top chefs, artisanal butchers, and educated consumers across the U.S. How and why did that happen? We saw the need for something better.

A Better Tasting Chicken

Over the years, our knowledge of raising poultry grew.  We wanted to supply the top culinary markets with the taste, texture and culinary advantages of superior birds, raised with no pesticides, growth stimulants or antibiotics EVER. 

We found our customers appreciated something better, more flavorful than factory-farmed commodity chickens. We set out to produce the absolute best tasting chicken possible.

Old World Breeding And Flavor

The more we traveled the world and learned about culinary matters, the more we realized that Americans were missing out on a rich array of culinary class poultry. Our search took us to Europe where they have been cultivating slow-growing heritage breeds for generations. We found the nest of these to bring home, reviving traditional raising methods to produce specialty poultry and game that impresses even the most discerning chefs with its quality and flavor. We call this our Heritage Poultry – chicken, French Guinea hen and pheasant of exceptional texture and taste.

The Next Step – Beef And Game

Not content with just producing the finest chickens, we sought out other worlds to conquer. Turning to the grass-fed beef category, we aimed to produce something that had been lacking: grass-fed beef with consistently full flavor and tenderness. And so was born Heritage Beef, a grass-fed beef with a taste that beats out the best beef in any category. We also introduced Naked Rabbit and Naked Duck, making Joyce Farms the premier source for all natural chicken, beef and game in the United States.