COVID boom stresses local meat cutters
‘The demand has definitely tripled’ — and labor is scarce for local meat cutters
Doug and Lois Aylestock, owners of Blue Ridge Meats in Front Royal, say demand has increased threefold since the start of the pandemic. “Because people are cooking from home, the family table has had a resurgence,” Lois Aylestock said, explaining that customers are now looking for cuts they can’t get in the grocery store. But the firm has struggled to find laborers — even untrained ones. “I think the industry as a whole has been undervalued and folks have a disconnect from their food system,” she said.
Bean Hollow farmer Mike Sands has been booking lambs for slaughter that aren’t even born yet. Why? Because since the beginning of the pandemic there has been a boom in demand for local meat while at the same time there’s a shortage of skilled meat cutters to process animals.
“Starting in June, I don’t think I ever had more than half a freezer full of [meat]. As soon as I’d get a processed animal back — I have an email list now of 500, 600 clients — and there would be people lined up out there,” Sands said, pointing across the driveway to his farm store where he sells frozen grass-fed beef, lamb, pork and poultry products.
Sands said that once the pandemic hit in 2020, his business “easily” could have sold six times the amount of meat he sold in 2019.
And with the demand for high-end meat comes the demand for artisanal meat processing, an admittedly tough job which falls to a handful of local companies like Blue Ridge Meats in Front Royal.
Run by husband-and-wife team Doug and Lois Aylestock, Blue Ridge Meats is a small processing company that handles beef, lamb, pork and goat. Whereas multinational corporations like Tyson and Smithfield have hundreds of employees and machines at their plants that can process nearly 20,000 animals per day, Blue Ridge employs about eight professional meat cutters and has the capacity to process 20 animals per day at most.
“Our biggest bottleneck right now is labor force,” Lois Aylestock said.
“When COVID-19 first hit, our phones were ringing off the hook. … The demand has definitely tripled. And a lot of people I don’t think trust the food system now after they saw the collapse … and our food system has been broken for a very long time.”
But the Aylestocks say they are having a hard time finding skilled workers to help them keep up with the high demand. They’ve tried going through hiring companies, ZipRecruiter, Indeed — and to no avail. “It’s very physical, you’ve got to be fast on your feet, you’ve got to multitask, and you’ve got to be logical. You’ve got to think about the fact that you’re putting food on someone’s table and each thing that you do is vitally important,” Aylestock said.
Aylestock said that meat cutters at Blue Ridge Meats are vitally important to their operations, as they’re involved in every step of the process from the time they slaughter or “harvest” an animal to the time they “break down” the meat into the kinds of retail cuts customers are used to seeing in the grocery store.
Aylestock said she doesn’t know exactly why workers — even untrained ones — are so hard to come by these days, but she believes it has been a long time coming. “I think the industry as a whole has been undervalued and folks have a disconnect from their food system,” she said.
“Unless you are economically in a position where you can go to Wegman’s or you can go to a farmer and buy high-end meat, you really don’t know who’s taking care of your food. And I think that’s one of the reasons why this industry is so undervalued.”
Dave Fox, an employee at Blue Ridge Meats, prepares oxtail for packaging. Meat cutters in small plants are involved in each step of the process, from harvesting to hanging and from cutting to packaging.
Doug and Lois Aylestock, pictured here in front of their family-owned business in Front Royal, have been in the meat processing industry for 20 years.