The Meating Place is a shop near Portland, Ore., that processed game for hunters and livestock for small farms. Miller found a job at Safeway in 1998 after learning how to cut his own meat. Miller was fed up with the direction of the meat industry.
He worked for his old boss, Steve Crossley, for a long time. Miller got Crossley's approval to reopen the Meating Place in exchange for free meat for the rest of his life. Miller rented the meat department of an old supermarket a few miles from the original shop and opened a small meat-processing service, mostly for beef, hogs, and wild game. Miller's vision was fuzzy. I had an idea that business would take off.
He decided he was better off controlling the whole operation after contracting with mobile slaughter services. Andrew Turner was a student at Oregon State University and worked in the meat science lab. Turner was soon booking as many as five stops per day with reservations required months in advance.
Miller's business has since expanded into all things meat, with a staff of about 60 and sales of $10 million, up 50% from before the Pandemic. Miller opened a retail market that featured skewered, dried, and stuffed meat. On-site smoking and curing, hard-to- find items, and crowd pleasers such as brisket, short ribs, and maple and blueberry sausage links have been added. Miller opened a restaurant next to him that served breakfast and lunch to people from nearby companies.
Four years ago he leased the entire supermarket and installed a 20,000- square-foot maze of walk-in coolers filled with different cuts of meat. There are many tools in the cutting rooms. A few paces away, there is a sausage stuffer, a brine injector, a bacon slicer, and smokehouses.
Turner's crew was frequently booked to process cattle and hogs by the owner of a small farm. She says anyone can shoot an animal, but doing it well requires an ability to deal with unpredictable farmers and animals while hanging and cutting a large carcass. The butcher left "boar hair in your bacon, bone dust in your pork chops", which is demoralizing for a farmer who rotates her pastures and allows her sons to oversee her hogs.
Animals are unaware that they are about to be slaughtered. Turner is said to facilitate this, recalling the time a hog went away. Turner simply let the hog run for a while and calm down, then walked over to complete the deed, despite the animal being in the wrong hands. She doesn't want anyone else on her property. The more scared the animal is the more frustrated the handler is.
The Meating Place wants to be as green as possible. Miller leased a farm fifteen miles away and brought in $500,000 worth of technology that will compost the animal parts left over. Turner will be raising about 100 cattle there. The company will get a guaranteed supply of beef after the animals are slaughtered. Miller pivoted and brought in whole carcasses because the facilities didn't have enough staff to cut them.
Miller plans to roll out a reduced-carbon line of beef during the early summer lull. The growing operation will be assessed by the US Department of Agriculture. He is making huge amounts of dog food. Miller is standing in front of a mountain of raw dog food that will be packed into tubes and frozen for later sale. In the fall, we don't have time to make dog food.
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