North Fork Packing

10/21/2026

Someone recently commented we have very restrictive pickup hours; they are not entirely wrong, but let me explain.

When we first started this business we were open all the time and gave up a lot of time to do so but noticed approx 85% of customers pick up on Fridays & Saturdays from 9-1.
With all investments in this business, whether time or money, we have to make calculated approaches, so we decided to limit our regular availability to the most popular windows of time.
Because we don’t have retail and are also our own slaughter, processing, clean up, maintenance, and admin crew, it does not make sense for us to wait around all day in the office for very limited customers to show.

Currently my husband Josh or I handle every single pickup.
We have decided in this stage of growing this business it is important for us to personally supervise and QC every single pickup, answer questions, and meet our customers face to face.

Tues - Thurs are our processing days and we are there 4:30AM - 2:30PM approximately. We ask people to make an appointment to pick up on those days, so we know to keep an eye out for you.

We do go out of our way to accommodate where we can: everything from having my dad meet people on a Sunday or even bringing orders back to my house for an after hours pickup.

Currently, we have no late afternoon / early evening pickups available.
We are also raising three kids and being available for them and their soccer, cross country, jazz band, sax lessons, robotics, the works, is frankly more important to us right now than being continuously available for late afternoon pickups.

Until our kids are grown or we feel comfortable releasing control and hiring a front desk person to wait around in the office to do pickups, that is our current arrangement.
We appreciate all our customers who are flexible and graciously work within these parameters.
We are a true mom and pop shop and handle almost everything ourselves; not having a 40 hr a week open office is one of the small drawbacks of that.

10/21/2026

Another reason we require all customers to submit their cut sheets online is we provide this disclaimer about take-home weight at the top of our fillable form.

The fact that this is an abstract concept, and sometimes either producers don’t take the time to explain it well or customers don’t take the time to understand it well, makes my life difficult every week.

Every single week I have someone pick up and disgruntled because they bought X pounds of meat for $Y, when in reality it was 60% of X for $Y/.6

At least when they get angry at me, which yes happens weekly, I am able to say: I provided you with an explanation in advance regarding the hanging weight to take home weight relationship. I wish you would have taken the time to read and understand it. 

*****
Additionally, often times consumers don’t really connect the dots between the estimated take-home weight and the effective cost per pound.
Often times people pick up and tell me I can’t believe that we were able to get this for $7.25/lb.
Me … well …

There is a very easy way to estimate your effective cost per pound: take your all in price (hanging weight cost and processing cost) and divide it by .6

The average take-home of meat out of a hanging carcass in our shop is 59.4%.
There is some huge variation there though: a really heavy fatty older cow can take home in the high 40% and a very lean young animal can take home in the high 60%.

For average sakes, estimate a take-home of 60%

$7.25/lb ($6/lb for the hanging weight + $1.25 processing) / .6 = effective and average estimated cost per take home lb is $12.08

Personally, I think that is an exceptional price for dry aged, high-quality, locally raised, custom processed beef.
Not only is it comparably priced to commercially and even internationally raised, corporate conglomerate grocery store beef, but it is significantly higher quality. 
However, it isn’t and never was going to be $7.25/lb.

An unfortunate reality of this industry that I wasn’t originally prepared for is that the butcher shop ends up being the bearer of bad news, if we take the time to explain it.
It is either explain something that is hard to understand AND disappoints the customer or be accused of theft.
What a catch 22 for all custom butcher shops everywhere.

10/20/2026

Life is funny.

A couple years ago I was a violinist and now here we are with a six man crew processing my friend’s deer for them.

Thanks Koral Notman and Adam Rybacki for sending us your deer!

Today we ran through in the cutting room nine beef, 11 sheep, and five deer.
That’s a record!
🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄
🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑
🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌

10/19/2026

Here is a summary of approximately two dozen phone calls I had today.

Wild game:

Yes we are accepting it!

Yes it has to be skinned.
No we don’t skin them.

Yes you have to print out and bring your tag and leave it with the meat.
Yes we will give the tag back to you when you pick up.
I don’t make the rules, but I know I’m supposed to have a tag with the meat. 

Yes we take bone in carcasses, assuming they are from in state.
(I feel like it nearly takes a law degree to understand all the hunting regulations, and I am not a hunter. I really rely on people following the law and not implicating us. We have a great relationship with WDFW, and I don’t want to compromise that. Please don’t do shady things and bring it here.)

No we don’t make added value products: pepperoni, summer sausage, etc (bear with us, we will get there).
We can package trim and you can take it over to Kelso‘s, Tnt, or Silvana Meats, (maybe Del Fox even, I’m not sure if they accept outside wild game trim or not), and they can make that for you. 

Yes we make grind with beef fat or pork fat and breakfast sausage seasoning.

Yes you get all your own animal back and no one else’s.

Deer minimum is $190 + $1.60/lb passed the minimum weight of 119 lbs. No hidden fees.
Yes, I understand it is expensive and you could do it yourself cheaper, but with a professional crew and product, that is what it costs us to offer this service.

Yes, if it is excessively dirty and takes us longer to process, you will be charged for that in addition. 

Happy hunting guys!

10/19/2026

Well, can’t win em all, they say.
This dude is not my fan.

He seems to think that we would get 10% higher yield if we grind the back fat into the burger.

10 percent!
Oh my. 🤣🤣🤣

Let’s discuss it:

As a consumer: do you want two week old, dry aged, potentially moldy even, back trim fat thrown in with your ground burger? 

Next, I have never heard of a custom exempt butcher giving a whole carcass customer an option of their exact fat percentage for their burger.
Truthfully, even if one did promise some thing like that, I can’t see how a custom exempt shop can promise a customer a specific result on a product that we don’t have control of the inputs.

I have never once said we don’t utilize the fat in the grind. Whatever intermuscular fat is in the meat is what is going to be in the ground beef. 

We do trim off the dry aged back fat.
Actually it would be SO much faster if we did not trim anything and just threw everything in the grinder.
There is not any way that we could get a 10% higher yield in meat though. 🤣
Just greasy as hell, with globs of unincorporated fat, ground beef.

All kinds of goofy takes here, to me, but to each their own perspective.

Granted, he got me there: we didn’t learn how to butcher in college.
I studied theoretical mathematics in college and my husband studied accounting.

10/19/2026

This post has been making circulation again, so I thought I would re-share.

Photographed here is a very average take home 1/4 of a beef.

Weekly we have customers that have no idea what to expect regarding take-home product.
Not to make anyone feel bad, but I have had people show up in a minivan asking if they have enough space to pick up a quarter of a beef.
I always feel a little bad when somebody is expecting a huge haul and I am the one to dash their dreams and am like: this is it.

This is a weekly occurrence, unfortunately, and I have to smile and remind people that I have in fact, put an entire processed beef in the trunk of my Honda Accord before.

Let’s do a little math.

Let’s say a 18-24 month old “in condition” steer comes to us, weighing 1400 lbs on the hoof : live weight.

We estimate about a 46% loss from “on the hoof” to “on the rail”, which would make the “hanging weight” for that beef’s carcass 756 lbs.

After aging for two weeks and being processed, a customer can expect (-/+) 60% of the hanging weight (after we cut off the aged exterior, fat, gristle, bones, etc) in take-home product weight, which would be 454 lbs of meat.

Back to the quarter customer, that would make their take-home product weigh 113lbs, which is roughly like the three boxes of meat shown above.

(Obviously, there is a huge variety there. We have processed an entire beef that weighed 300 pounds hanging and have also processed an entire beef that weighed 1700 pounds hanging. The age / feed / breed of an animal are going to change these numbers; this is just one specific example that’s pretty common for an average steer raised to be butchered in condition.)

As I always say, an educated customer with realistic expectations is a happy one.

Truthfully, one of the hard things about this industry for me is we work with dozens, up to 100, customers every week, and a lot of them have never had experience buying directly from a farm before and have no idea what to expect when having a portion of an animal custom processed.
There’s only so much time I have available on a weekly basis to help new processing customers understand the process, so our goal as a processor is to present as much information as we can upfront here on Facebook and on our website, so that farmers and therefore their customers really understand the process start to finish and what they are going to get and what is reasonable and what isn’t.
Like I was saying, it is unreasonable to expect to fill a minivan with 1/4 of a beef, but if you didn’t really know what you were buying, and you had never done this before, how would you know?

I would love to see more new consumers purchasing meat farm direct and farmers raising the animals to sell to them, and that involves a real team effort of getting out into the community and helping educate and reaching consumers on what to expect.

10/19/2026

Facebook algorithms and engagement is so funny to me.

Last week I posted a picture of a customer’s hamburger in their freezer = 177,000 views

Yesterday this ad that we have a little space in our schedule left in October = 503 views

Lol.

Anyhow we have a little bit of space left to round out our slaughter and processing schedule this month.

Schedule now for the month of November as well.

Late fall / early winter slaughter dates:
Dec 5 = very limited openings, all animals
Dec 12 = all grind beef, pigs, and sheep only

Dec 13 - Jan 8 = closed for slaughter
The office will be closed Dec 23 - Jan 7.

First slaughter openings of 2027:
Jan 8&9

Give me a message or call and save your date!
360-631-1531

10/18/2026

Limited slaughter options for October still!

Give me a call or message to save your slaughter spot-

360-631-1531

10/18/2026

The internet is a rough place for butchers, man.

This was a comment left elsewhere, but I know it is a common sentiment.

Our shop processed nearly 24,000 lbs this week, which is approx 14,400 lbs of take home meat.
If I stole 25% of that, I would have stolen 3,600 lbs of meat which would take 103 cubic square feet of freezer space.
The Roundy family is huge on meat consumption but even for us and our teen boys, that might be a bit much.

Never mind we are very proud of our take home data we share with every customer and siphoning off a 1/4 of their order every time would reflect very poorly on that.
I am more interested in having accurate data on the industry than I am pocketing some crappy cut of meat.
(No one with nice beef ever accuses us of stealing, for the record. It is always the awful beef that the accusations come from.)

It was insinuated just yesterday alone that I was responsible for someone’s small tritip and missing steaks.
We process a lot of 20 month old grass finished beef this time of year: the cuts just aren’t that large.

It is so hard for the general public to picture that a beef carcass isn’t made entirely of edible muscle (and processing it loses about 40% of the weight in moisture and non edible products) that butchers get regularly accused of theft of a product that never even existed.

Plus whenever I want beef I walk out in my parent’s field next door, pick out a nice one, and run it through.

I know the joke is “the butcher’s freezer is never empty” but to me it is because we have the skills it takes to fill one; it is not that I am stealing 3600 lbs of meat a week. 😉

10/18/2026

Update!
I was right. The freezer looks nothing like this now, lol, as it is completely packed.

We are legitimately at the place that if the customers that have said they will pick up on Tuesday and Wednesday don’t, we will not be able to fit Thursday’s cuttings in the freezer.

Our freezers are perfectly large enough to handle a full weeks worth of processing at full capacity, but they are not large enough to handle storing those orders and then cutting and freezing the same amount of volume again the following week.

Eventually, if our desire is to run at this capacity more than just during the month of October, maybe we will do a freezer expansion.
For now though, we just need orders to go home within one week of being notified it is ready.

New shop policy: if you have not picked up an order within 10 days of being notified, a storage fee will apply.
Currently, I am working out what the number is, but I am thinking like $50,000 a day or so.
;)