A Message From The Owner - Stephen

Butchering has been part of our family for over 50 years.

I started when I was 11, some 30-odd years ago. I started washing dishes, then progressed to working in the school holidays and mixing the sausages in the old Berry Senior Mincer.

These days the mincer/mixers do all the work for you, mixing and mincing inside the machine. When I started, it was just a mincer, and you mixed it all by hand… all hundreds of cold kilos of it! In the winter months, you couldn’t feel your fingers, but the summers were good to keep you cool. Those were the days before modern technology.

Leaving school in 1998 to take on an apprenticeship, I soon became a qualified butcher. Smaller butcher shops were on the decline in New Plymouth. With only one major butcher store in town – Matador Meats, I convinced my father, Peter, we should progress from being focused mainly on wholesale to opening a large-scale store in the downtown CBD as I could see a gap in the retail market for us to compete.

Coming up nearly 20 years later, we are still here and growing, which is a testament to our team. The business interruptions we have faced during Covid have been somewhat challenging but also an opportunity for us to diversify and create an online model inside our existing business.

Online has seen a rapid rise in home shopping due to isolation and people not wanting to shop in large crowds. The digital age is something we cannot turn a blind eye to, and with people being time poor and fuel prices on the rise, it only makes sense to take advantage of having your shopping delivered to your door, so you can spend more time doing things you enjoy and less time, wasting money on fuel and finding a car park.

With online shopping being so popular, we decided to include another dimension to our business and expand again. To do this, we recently fitted out an online packing room within our existing building space to be able to pack online orders. We also sought professional assistance with our website to iron out glitches and enhance our marketing.

We still like to take our own images, so not everything is picture-perfect, but we’re ok with that. We are a small local business that has been taking small National steps, and we aim to keep improving along the way. Exciting times ahead.

It makes me wonder what challenges and changes the next 19 years are going to bring…?