About Pel-Freez

While the family was living in Inglewood, California, Herman F. Pelphrey’s son was given a pregnant pet rabbit named Betsy Ann. Before long the household was overrun with rabbits, so Herman built a backyard rabbitry and began selling fresh rabbit meat to friends and neighbors. The small business soon expanded to commercial outlets across Los Angeles.

The H. F. Pelphrey Company officially opened in 1918 and moved its operations to Los Angeles. Through the 1920s and 1930s it was the largest fresh rabbit meat processor in California. In 1936 Herman’s son David became a full partner and the business was renamed H. F. Pelphrey and Son.

Pelphrey and Son patented their quick-frozen rabbit meat and introduced the Pel-Freez brand, an early breakthrough in food preservation. Because rabbit was not rationed like beef and pork during World War II, it was sought after by military and civilian consumers alike, and the company became the largest rabbit meat producer in the United States.

Pelphrey and Son became the first frozen meat provider in the United States to ship a full railroad carload of its own product from coast to coast. The California plant was running at capacity, and demand from the U.S. Armed Forces and civilian customers was outpacing the supply of West Coast rabbit growers.

A nationwide search for rabbit growers led to Northwest Arkansas. Herman’s son-in-law Robert “Bob” Dubbell moved to Rogers to open and manage a second plant in the former Rogers Canning building, reaching out to growers across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. The Rogers plant was such a success that the California plant closed in 1955, the whole operation moved to Arkansas in 1957, and the family business incorporated in 1961 as Pel-Freez Rabbit Meat, Inc.

A New York advertising campaign set out “to acquaint the American public with frozen domestic farm-bred rabbit meat.” A national cooking contest crowned Lola Mason “Miss Pel-Freez Frozen Rabbit Meat,” and she toured thirteen cities preparing rabbit dishes for food editors, hotel chefs and television audiences. The campaign peaked with “Buffet de Lapin au Champagne,” a rabbit-and-champagne party at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel prepared by six of New York’s top executive chefs.

Medical researchers began calling Rogers with requests for specific animal by-products, and Pel-Freez answered by founding a biologicals division to supply rabbit blood, tissues and serum to the emerging biomedical research industry. One of the first products was rabbit brain acetone powder, the thromboplastin source for Dr. Armand Quick’s prothrombin time test; Dr. Quick himself traveled to Rogers to teach Bob Dubbell the process. It remains one of our top-selling products today.

The newly renamed Pel-Freez ran a monthly campaign in Good Housekeeping built around Petey, a cartoon youngster whose friends were obsessed with rabbit meat, and carried the character into trade mailers for grocers, brokers and growers, introducing him as “our new rabbit salesman.”

Herman Pelphrey’s grandsons David and Paul Dubbell purchased Pel-Freez and focused on expansion. By 1979 a line of animal-based immunology and blood fraction products had joined the biologicals catalog, backed by an experienced scientific marketing team based in Rogers. By the 1970s the biologicals division had become the company’s major revenue source, and in 1982 David Dubbell became sole owner and president.

By the 1980s the message had sharpened to a single phrase. President David Dubbell believed it better to educate the public with “rabbit recipes and the health attributes of rabbit meat, and never ever mention Easter bunnies or Bugs Bunny or Thumper.” “Get the Rabbit Habit” went on bumper stickers, packaging and point-of-sale material, positioning rabbit as a sustainable, healthy premium protein, a vision Pel-Freez Foods carries today.

A series of subsidiaries broadened the biologicals business: Pel-Freez Clinical Systems (Brown Deer, Wisconsin, 1981) manufactured FDA-approved tissue-typing kits for organ transplantation; Immunovision (Springdale, Arkansas, 1985) produced autoimmune diagnostic kits; a 50-acre farm in Lowell, Arkansas scaled up secondary antibody production; and Novagen, Inc. (Madison, Wisconsin, 1989) carried Pel-Freez into molecular biology, reaching profitability within three years and becoming a world leader in its field. In 2001 Pel-Freez Biotechnology Beijing opened to support tissue typing for a national bone marrow drive with the Chinese Red Cross.

On March 31, 2020, David Dubbell sold Pel-Freez Foods and Pel-Freez Biologicals to a private investment partnership led by Dr. Brian Bonk, now President and CEO. Under Dr. Bonk, Pel-Freez Biologicals supplies more than 200 products to over 1,000 customers worldwide, from complement and serum for vaccine evaluation to tissues and antibodies for coagulation diagnostics and neuroscience research, and continues to grow its catalog for modern life science companies.

Under new management, the rabbit meat business that started it all in 1911 took a new name: Natural State Rabbit, a nod to its Arkansas home. Still based in Rogers and supplied by a network of domestic family farms, Natural State Rabbit brings farm-raised, all-natural rabbit to grocers, restaurants and home kitchens nationwide, with a retail outlet at the Arkansas Street plant. Pel-Freez Biologicals continues as the life science business, supplying animal and human biologicals to researchers, diagnostics developers and pharmaceutical manufacturers worldwide.