Meet Your Butcher: Fleisher's Craft Butchery
The Local Roots team visited the production facility of Fleisher’s Craft Butchery in the neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn. The butchery helps supply the delicious beef, lamb and charcuterie for your shares from the lovely waterfront of Pier 44. It’s important that we not only visit but pay homage to the people who make the Local Roots vision a reality. Some things we learned while hanging out with the butchery team:
- Josh and Jessica Applestone established Fleisher’s in 2004, but the idea of craft butchery was the birth child of two Fleisher’s apprentices in 2011, Paul Nessel and Ryan Fibiger.
- Fleisher’s butchers 26 whole hogs, 15-20 cattle and 12 lambs daily. They use the whole animal, limiting waste and demonstrating how much they value and honor the animals they butcher.
- The butchery is USDA certified – meaning there is a USDA agent on site, monitoring the butchering process, cleanliness of the facility, and sampling the meats several times daily for contamination.
- The butchery’s farms are all Animal Welfare Approved – the gold star for raising livestock as it is the only label requiring pasture access for all animals – and are free of GMO feed, antibiotics and growth hormones.
- Their animals are all pasture-raised on a grain-finish diet. This means they are primarily grass-fed but are given small amounts of grain throughout their lives to ensure they have enough fat to keep them warm during New England’s colder months.
- Almost all of Fleisher’s farms supply exclusively to the butchery, which means they are providing enough revenue for some small farmers to get started and others to stay in business.
Getting to know the products we provide our Local Roots community is an important part of our value proposition: we promise to bring New Yorkers quality food and to establish deep relationships with our farmers so you can trust the food that you pick up through Local Roots NYC comes from holistic producers with healthy growing practices. Keep an eye out for a cut from Fleisher’s in your next meat or charcuterie share. And don’t forget – a happy animal is a loved one!
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