How an NYC Butcher Shop is Surviving the Pandemic — Prime Time

we receive four sides of beef and eight peaks in two laps 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 kinder hook 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 before the pandemic we've basically just been working on how we're gonna grow the business and then went down it felt like the holidays where everyone was just frantically buying things and didn't know what they were necessarily gonna do with nine pounds of lamb shoulder but they were buying it because that's what was available and we basically needed a call to action and 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 knowing that our demand was going to skyrocket we called our farmers caught 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 like when you're getting beef and pork deliveries every single day which is way different than the pre-kovid way of doing business you never had to worry about a short supply [Applause] [Music] i never thought that the one thing that would get people through a pandemic would be boneless skinless chicken breasts holy [ __ ] 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 a thousand birds a week which is insane almost every grocery store was completely out it just became a staple in everyone's order [Music] one of the numerous ways that our business has been altered and i think probably forever is online ordering delivering pickup platforms has 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 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 we're at chills 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 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 when when we set out to open a shop like 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 just was give us your stuff we'll pay you for it we'll figure out how to sell it we just needed to help our community our goal of opening the butcher shop was literally just to make the transaction of buying meat completely transparent you knew where your meat 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 [Music] when it 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 like we're not going to participate in the system and it's worked out we're not going to 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 it was 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 pandemic at this team and they showed up and they did the job everyone did really look out for themselves but they 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 like the cleanest best food available and that's a really important thing to every person that works for us you

Channel: Eater

Views: 763,483

Keywords: butcher shop, butcher shop business, butcher shop tour, running a butcher shop, small business, nyc butcher shop, brooklyn butcher shop, local butcher shop, local meat, farm to table meat, meat industry, butcher, beef, butchering meat, how to run a butcher shop, The Meat Hook, the meat hook butchers, the meat hook new york, the meat hook butcher shop, businesses during pandemic, meat, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, chef, foodie, food show, prime time, meat cuts

Id: hlvgoXVuVPE

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020