Alleghany Meats To Offer Retail Sales
The two main goals behind the creation of Alleghany Meats, the slaughter and processing facility located in Highland County, were to give area producers more marketing opportunities and to give consumers greater access to locally produced meat products. Now, a long-considered addition to the business’ services will begin Monday, to help further those goals along. We spoke with office and financial manager Troy Snead who talked about what Alleghany Meats does.
“Alleghany Meats is a small slaughter/processing plant. We process animals that producers or individuals bring in – they can be “Not For Sale”, which means that you’re going to eat them yourself, or we can do USDA, which means you will retail your meats.
“We do beef, pork, lamb, goat and bison.”
Ms. Snead was excited to reveal the new service.
“Yes, we are actually going to, and as I like to say, complement our producers, we don’t want to compete with them. We want to offer them another avenue for them to be able to offer their meat products for sale. It’s been farmers’ markets, a few local stores have sold it, and we felt like that there was a need to have a central location that’s there, Monday through Friday, 8:00- 5:00, that can have meat for anybody that comes into town, local people, tourists travelling through – actually we had somebody come in that’s staying in some of the cottages- they heard that we were going to sell meat. We haven’t started yet, so they were a little early, but that’s our goal, is just to give our local producers another avenue to promote their meat.
“We are opening, the first official day will be May 15th.”
She spoke about the specifics of how it will work.
“So what we will do is, we’re going to start out with, maybe, four or five producers. We’re going to start out small, see how it goes. We’re going to ask the producers to give us maybe four or five different cuts of meat. We will have the traditional grass/grain finished – we’re also going to hopefully offer some grass-fed only, no GMO’s – so we have a little bit of variety for everybody.
“We’re going to do it on consignment. So the producer will still own their product – they’ll be responsible for rotating it and keeping it up to date. We will charge a commission fee from the producer, and we will collect sales tax for them.
“It’s going to be located in the Alleghany Meats building. Everything will be frozen. We will have the freezer in there, we have the board already up, it will have the producer’s name, their product and their price. We’re going to hope to have all the producers give us little information sheets about their farm, so if somebody who is not local wants to come in and read more about their farm or contact them, we hope to hand those out for them also.
“And if anyone is interested in maybe buying a half or a whole beef, contact us at Alleghany Meats – we have many producers who are looking to sell animals – not cuts, but a whole or a half animal. We can help hook you up with them.”
Ms. Snead provided contact information for those wanting to learn more.
“So we have a website, it’s www.alleghanymeats.com, on Facebook, we’re Alleghany Meats on Facebook. You can always call for more information, I’m there Monday through Friday from 8:00 – 5:00, the number is 540-474-2422, and let’s talk.”
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