There are a few extremely key differences between what we offer versus what you can find at the grocery, your local butcher shop, or online from a meat shipping service:
We Dry Age the entire beef carcass for 21 Days! This is extremely rare and hard to find nowadays. You lose about 6-7% moisture weight each week that you age. Everything you get in the store comes from the big slaughterhouses where they just chill the carcass for 24 hours and then cut and wrap and send to grocery stores. They do this to sell that moisture weight. The result is a lack of flavor. When we lose the 20% moisture weight the flavor concentrates and you get the true flavor of beef. Even most butcher shops in Western Washington don’t Dry Age. If they do age its 7-10 days. The other benefit to Dry Aging is that it gives time for enzymes to break down which tenderizes the meat. Dry Aging the entire carcass results in getting roasts, ground, ribs, & steaks that all have amazing true beef flavor! With this aging process we lose 20% moisture weight and about 5% additional trim loss as the outside layer of the carcass hardens. This sets us back about 25% on a finished weight basis, which is why we have to charge a little more than the store or some butchers.
Our cattle are not given steroid implant making them hormone free. All the cattle that go into the big feedlots are given a steroid implant so they will pack on weight faster and finish out about 3 weeks sooner. Everything you get in the grocery stores (unless marked as hormone free) is getting the implant. Also a key thing to know is that almost all butcher shops do not have their own USDA inspected slaughter facility. There are only about 6 butchers across the state of Washington that have USDA inspected slaughter. In order for a store, butcher shop, or farmer to sell small quantity(less than 1/4 of the animal) they have to use cattle that have walked live through a usda inspected slaughter facility. This means the meat in the stores and most butcher shops is coming from massive feedlots, then to massive slaughterhouses.
If your butcher doesn’t have a USDA slaughter facility attached to their building(about 99% of butchers) they are very likely getting their cattle from the big slaughterhouses! So the only difference between your local butcher and the grocery store is that they probably have more experienced meat cutters and they might be aging a few days. But they are getting those same steroid implanted cattle coming in from the massive feedlots.
We feed both our Cattle and Pigs Non-GMO feed. There is no soy(very high in hormones and almost exclusively GMO) in any of our feeds. Most pig feed contains soy as the main protein source. We source non-GMO feed sources for both cattle and pigs. We are willing to pay a little more to have quality feed in order to have meat that is as natural as we can possibly make it for our client base.