I applauded the newly opened The Swinery last fall for its philosophy of “no boxed meat” and purchasing “whole” locally pastured animals, but, after my first visit, I wondered about its future success. I was especially concerned about its West Seattle location and whether Seattle was a big enough market for its program and the pricing that necessarily entailed. At the time, I crossed my fingers hoped that it did, and visited the shop regularly.
Most butcher shops in days of yore were neighborhood operations, passed down generation after generation from father to son, or daughter for that matter. I thought that opening a butcher shop today in a part of town not typically known as a food “destination” by the rest of the city would make the shop doubly reliant on the neighborhood. Sure, West Seattle had a thriving weekly Farmers’ Market, but would these customers also regularly pay the true cost of having skilled artisan butchers buy animals raised locally on small farms and breakdown them down into cuts of meat when most of their meat options in the neighborhood over the last decade or so have been cello wrapped and priced to move. Trying to convince all of the potential ‘local’ customers of the truly significant value being added in the freshness, quality and variety of meats offered would take time, and time is money - money well spent to my mind.
Even if the proprietors didn’t worry about converting the ‘20-pork-chop-cello-pack-specials’ industrial meat crowd, it’s still a tough sell to those who are more concerned about the quality and source of their meat. They have other options in Seattle, several established butcher shops, three Whole Foods, and a number of Food Co-ops all marketing their meat. Even though all of them sell boxed meat, several appear to be sourcing from small, local sounding operations, - or at least that's how they are labeled. They are obviously targeting the ‘source concerned’ food market segment with the romance of their 'farmers'. Even though this segment has a certain amount of savvy, the reluctance to pay price differentials of $2 to $5 per pound still requires education to overcome, possibly even more. This is especially true if customers are expected to fight traffic on the crowded highways and screwy overpasses to get there. And, what happens if they make the trek only to find the meat case half empty!
Trying to juggle buying and butchering whole animals even with a well established customer base would be challenging enough, but doing so for a new operation in light of an uncertain start-up demand could be very costly. Especially, given that most people’s inclinations have been set by an unlimited supply of narrowing choices in their supermarkets over the last two decades. Adjustments to the Swinery's offerings began after a few months when items like mutton and veal didn’t move, and this was understandable. While these are two extreme cases given the decades of negative publicity that have banished them from our culinary consciousness, they are telling examples. I even understood when I arrived one day in early January to see a half-full case with only a small number of cuts and little ground meat available. I knew it was my responsibility to pay attention to the shop’s schedule, but would others?
Today I got there bright and early to buy some ground pork and ground beef for a new meatloaf recipe I wanted to try. Both were in the case, but curiously the ground beef was in sealed plastic bags - something I had never seen before in the shop or ever expected to see. I ordered one pound of each and was told that the beef was already packaged in two-pound bags, but…it was at a discounted price. The butcher was also behind the case, and he mentioned that they would offer bulk again, but they were bagging it this way for the Super Bowl, and there was no suggestion of breaking a bag open for me. This truly bizarre nod to a contemporary phenomenon by a company marketing itself based on a traditional model dumbfounded me. I left the shop with a pound of ground pork, wondering how this new two-pound merchandising strategy fit into the shop’s “buying whole animals raised within three hundred miles instead of boxed meat” philosophy, and how many new customers it would convert. I wonder how many butchers in town are requiring a two-pound minimum for Super Bowl ground beef.
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