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Another option would be to add an additional large processing plant, while still promoting smaller, independent butchers, who avoided many of the difficulties imposed by production slowdowns at the meat behemoths this summer.
Brianna Hagell, owner of Vessel Meats in Dartmouth, N.S., opened up her brick-and-mortar store at the beginning of May but had run her butcher business in farmers’ markets since December 2016.
“Our beef prices hardly changed because we only do whole-carcass,” she told the Post. “All of our suppliers are local.”
She said the first week she opened, a least one large retailer wasn’t selling ribeye steaks in her region because prime rib out east was so expensive. Hagell, however, was able to butcher and sell the top-tier cut because she sources all her beef from local Nova Scotia farms.
Sean Kuzenkow, who owns Buckingham Meat Company in Whitby, Ont., sources all his beef from a small packing plant in Norwich, Ont., He also said his prices for beef didn’t see much change over the summer.
In fact, he said, some employees at the large grocery chains regularly bought beef from his shop because it was cheaper. “Some of them, if they had good customers, they were telling people to come to us for a few months.”
Though these smaller supply chains better withstood the effects of COVID-19, von Massow said that doesn’t discount big beef’s ability to bounce back. “As numbers have gone up again this fall, we haven’t really heard about issues in food processing plants at all. So the protocols that they’ve put into these plants seemed to have really worked,” he said.
