Meat&Poultry - August 2011 - 69

fairs, as well as game animals, such as moose, deer, elk, bear, wild hogs, ducks and pheasants. He custom smokes turkeys, hams and even salmon, too. The Dewey enterprise also has a catering branch, which David foresees as the growth area with the most potential. “We really don’t have a catering menu,” David confides. “We cook roasting pigs and the customers pick them up. We’ve learned to bone out a pig and use pork shoulders to stuff inside. That way we can serve perhaps 200 people with an 80-lb. hog. We also stuff some hogs with sauerkraut and even mashed potatoes. “We don’t have a website, although we’ve been looking at the concept,” he says. “I’m a technical dinosaur…a cowboy beans kind of guy who likes to be outside…but my daughter, Jennifer, seems to have a much better grasp on those areas. She is also our sausage formulator and meat-block mixer.” The Dewey family just recently bought a bowl chopper, tumbling and marinating equipment and is now looking to improve its product capabilities. With rendering costs everrising, David recognized years ago an opportunity to smoke and flavor beef bones for pets. “People know things are tight in the economy, but they absolutely will spend money for their pets,” he says. “You know, I’ve never had a dog complain or come in to say the treats were too salty. It’s just something that can add to our bottom line.” And adding to that bottom line are smoked pork femurs, pet jerky made from liver, as well as pork skins that are rolled and double-smoked. “When you can get $12 a lb. for a product that you had to pay someone to take away, it makes you think,” he says. His biggest concerns are the ever-expanding regulations that fall on small businesses least geared to handle them and says it is a “sad thing” to see so many small plants for sale in his area.

Yet, one block away from Chico Locker & Sausage Co. is the site of the first locker plant in the US. Chico Ice & Cold Storage began in 1908 and a few years later provided a processing area where farmers could cut up and wrap meat from their own livestock for frozen storage. It was a business that inspired tens of thousands of others to tap the potential of what was then a new wave. David’s lament about his fellow processors is almost prophetic: “Many folks in this business don’t want to push their kids into it. They see and live fi rsthand the paperwork burdens associated with everything from BSE, to new regulations designed to build fi rewalls of food safety that is out of proportion to what a small family business can realistically handle. It is a trade that is already hard enough to navigate and

the workload of just producing meat products is staggering. When you see health-care costs rise by 40 percent and 30 percent in successive years, it

The family’s commitment to offering quality products and personal service has made it a nationally known success story.
gives you great pause. It comes down to hard work and some just plain get tired of it,” he concludes. ■
Steve Krut, an industry veteran, is a contributing editor writing exclusively for Meat&Poultry, specializing in small business issues. He resides in Marietta, Pa. We would like to hear from you – to comment on this story or to request reprints, contact us by email at meatpoultry@sosland.com.

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Meat&Poultry - August 2011

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