posted 9 years ago
Our butcher shop is setup for full USDA/State inspection so we can do every type of sale: whole pigs, half pigs, retail cuts, wholesale cuts. About 88% of our business is wholesale cuts to local stores and restaurants and that is what requires the highest level of inspection and licensing.
We are starting with the butchering, the meat cutting, in the initial cutter room (iCutter). Then we'll very quickly add sausage making (a different HACCP protocol). This winter we'll finish off the walk in freezer, cooler and brine room followed by building the initial small smoker (~3'x3'x6' probably) where we'll learn to smoke. After that will come finishing off the final cutter room which is about 3x larger than iCutter. Then we'll move cutting into final cutter so that iCutter will be transformed into the warm kitchen and the east end of iCutter will be able to become our big final smokehouse (~6'x8'x8') which is large enough for double batching and smoking whole hogs. Lastly, in two to three years, we'll finish off the abattoir, lairage and carcass chiller so we can also do on-farm slaughter. Step-by-step in chunks we can afford and accomplish. At this point we have the entire shell of the building completed, plumbed, electrified and ready for interior finishing so we can phase in the remaining processes as we're ready.
All the hogs we sell are ones we've raised - they're our pigs. What we do is raise pigs on pasture. Adding the butcher shop is vertical integration - value added processing. We're gradually taking on the processing we currently hire out so that money stays here and we can have better control.
Cheers,
-Walter
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