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- We receive 4 sides of beef,
and 8 pigs and 2 lambs every week.
When we receive the pigs, we try to process that
as quickly as we can
because the truck is waiting for us.
- So the delivery is every Monday - beef from Kinderhook
and Gibson Family Farm, pigs from Gibson Family Farm
that shows up at eight.
And then it is a mad dash
to get it all broken down as quickly as possible.
So nothing's on the table for very long
and it's back in refrigerator, organized,
tucked away so we can begin our week.
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- Before the pandemic, we'd basically just been working
on how we're going to grow the business.
And then s*** went down, it felt like the holidays
where everyone was just frantically buying things
and didn't know what they're necessarily going to do
with the nine pounds of lamb shoulder,
but they were buying it because that's what was available.
And we basically needed a call to action,
to figure out how we could meet customer demand.
Everyone's office job went out the window like immediately,
we just needed all hands on deck in the butcher shop,
either cutting meat or selling meat all the time.
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Knowing that our demand was going to skyrocket,
we called our farmers, called a couple other farmers
that we know
and added a couple beef, a couple pigs,
started getting everything when we could.
At the height of the purchasing madness,
we were getting beef and pork deliveries every single day.
Which is way different than
the pre-COVID way of doing business,
we never had to worry about a short supply.
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I never thought that the one thing
that would get people through a pandemic would be
boneless, skinless chicken breast. Holy s***.
People really love boneless, skinless chicken breast.
- When the week of March 9th hit,
we were already kind of like, man,
we sell a lot of chicken.
The week after we probably easily
tripled our sales in chicken.
We're now selling close to like 1000 birds in a week,
which is insane.
- Almost every grocery store was completely out.
It just became a staple in everyone's order.
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- One of the numerous ways that our business
has been altered and I think probably forever
is online ordering.
- Delivery and pickup platforms have become
a major part of our business,
whereas we never put any emphasis on it whatsoever
because our entire business was built
around customer interaction.
So we never took delivery very seriously,
and it was something that our customers
also never really demanded.
- The way fulfillment works,
We have a new team that we created.
They print everything out, fill the bags,
it goes to register,
once it's at register, it's rung up.
Then it comes out here,
where it chills.
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50 a day for our in-store pickup
and then we do 25 a day for delivery.
Coincidentally, not knowing,
you know, that this was all happening,
we had bought this truck the week
before everything shut down in the city
to help with our sausage company doing deliveries.
This was becoming like 40% of our business.
And we realized we actually have to design a team
with managers and have shifts that are dedicated
to making sure this works because it's very important.
Like we had no idea what we were starting
and it turned out to be incredibly crucial.
It would normally be six months we would take
to come up with a system like this and implement it.
We did it in about six days.
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- When when we set out to open the shop
we wanted to offer produce,
because we wanted to be a one-stop shop.
As soon as all of this happened,
people did start buying everything from us.
We became a full grocery store incredibly quickly.
It seemed like everyone closed their restaurants
immediately and retail stores, you know,
went dark immediately as well.
We were fortunate enough to stay open.
We started buying stuff from restaurants
and basically anyone that was just selling something
that we thought we could help them.
So it was never a question of, "What are the logistics?"
I just was - "Give us your stuff,
we'll pay for it, we'll figure out how to sell it."
We just needed to help our community.
(door grill opening)
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- Our goal of opening the butcher shop was literally
just to make the transaction
of buying meat completely transparent.
Where you knew it was coming from,
where it was being butchered,
and it was being sold to you right there.
Just completely cut out any sort of middleman.
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- When the s*** hits the fan with the food system,
and specifically with meat,
we're completely insulated from any trauma related to that.
We have like completely said f*** 'em,
we're not gonna participate in the system
and it's worked out.
We're not gonna wait for somebody else
to tell us what the right thing is to do here,
we're just going to do what we feel is right by our staff,
our community, and our farmers.
- Being in the shop full time was,
I mean, honestly exhilarating,
because I love being there,
but also just somewhat terrifying,
because I've never seen anything like this in my lifetime.
For us to be personally responsible for everyone's safety,
is probably the most stressful thing
I've ever had to go through.
It was great that business was good,
but the risks associated with it
just felt really heavy on Ben and I,
but there's literally no time
to even have a conversation about what to do,
we just had to constantly react.
- It's the best crew we've ever had.
They just keep getting better.
And you throw a f****** pandemic at this team,
and they showed up and they did the job.
- Everyone did really look out for themselves
but they are also were amazingly resilient
and super strong in coming to work every day,
which is a scary thing and doing it because they knew
that like people really need food.
And we offer the cleanest,
best food available and that's a really important thing
to every person that works for us.
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