For a local butcher shop, it doesn’t get much busier than November.
Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching, ushering in a season where nearly every customer wants turkey, prime rib or ham for holiday dinners. At the same time, hunters are still bringing in fresh carcasses for processing, finishing a busy hunting season that kicked off in September.
“That week is just crazy,” said Peter Kurfurst, manager at Butcher Boys in Vancouver.
Butcher Boys is one of just a few butcher shops in Vancouver, but Kurfurst said the business has enjoyed consistent growth despite operating in a niche market. The store celebrated its 50-year anniversary in May.
The shop was founded in 1969 by Kurfurst’s parents, Jim and Barbara. Jim Kurfurst had worked at a butcher shop in Portland, and the couple decided to open their shop in Vancouver because there weren’t any shops on this side of the river at the time.
Peter Kurfurst worked at the shop as a teenager and returned to help run it after working for about a decade in the construction industry. He now oversees all day-to-day operations. The shop’s facilities and product lineup have grown substantially over the years, but Kurfurst said customers are still drawn in by the core promise of custom and locally prepared meats.
“Pretty much everything you see (on the counter) that’s processed, we make here,” he said.
Butcher Boys moved to its current location 4710 E Fourth Plain Blvd in 2011, a change which Kurfurst said put it in a better location with a little more space — although the business’s growth quickly caught up. Butcher Boys employed 12 people at the time of the move, and that number has now risen to 19.
“We didn’t have enough space (from) the day we moved in,” he said.
A trio of refrigerated shipping containers now sit in the building’s rear lot, housing more product that can’t fit in the main store.
The shop sees about 200 customers on an average day, Kurfurst said, and while there are always new faces, many of the customers are repeat visitors — often coming from all over Clark County and the Portland area.
“Most of our sales are probably word of mouth,” he said.
The only hiccup in the shop’s growth has been a slight dip in customer traffic this year, which Kurfurst attributes to the removal of the traffic lights on state Highway 500, preventing westbound drivers from making left turns to cut down to Fourth Plain. But the numbers have started to pick up again, he said, so it looks like people are adjusting to the new grid.
The shop’s back room is a constant flurry of activity as workers move meat products between a half-dozen different workstations.
The center of the shop’s back area is dominated by a walk-in cooler and three indoor smokehouses, each a bit larger than a home refrigerator. During a visit in early November, they’re all busy preparing batches of bacon and pepperoni.
“This time of year, they’re running 24/7,” Kurfurst said. “Probably through Christmas.”
The smokehouses are one of the best examples of technological change in the butchering industry, Kurfurst said. The actual process hasn’t changed, but the modern smokehouses are controlled by a central computer that can monitor the interior conditions and either make adjustments or notify operators when it’s time to make a change. Kurfurst can even control them remotely from his phone.
The nearby injector station is another example, he said. In an old-school setup, the butcher would need to manually inject sauce into a turkey with a single needle and tube — essentially making the same arm motion over and over for hours. Now, a machine controls more than a dozen needles at once.
“What used to be a week’s worth of work, we can do it in an hour and a half,” he said.
At another counter, a machine mixes together 200 pounds of ground elk meat with jalapeno and shredded cheddar cheese, prepping a mixture that will become the filling for about 50 large link sausages.
A cooler at the rear door holds deer carcasses brought in by hunters for processing.
Butcher shops can only sell USDA-certified meats to customers, Kurfurst said, but they can offer personalized butchering services to hunters who bring in their own animal carcasses for prepared cuts or processing into products like sausages and pepperoni.
That service represents about 15 to 20 percent of Butcher Boys’ business on average, Kurfurst said, but it can jump up to as much as half the business during hunting season in September, October and November.
The mid-November shipment represents the last round of hunting season service the shop will offer for the year, Kurfurst said; the staff is about to put all of its attention to preparation for Thanksgiving.
The cooler is already packed almost to capacity with turkeys of all sizes, and the staff will need to get started smoking them soon. Customer orders have begun to pour in, and the shop expects to sell up to 3,000 turkeys, Kurfurst said, mostly on the Saturday, Tuesday and Wednesday leading up to Thanksgiving. Almost immediately afterward, the staff will begin preparing for the run-up to Christmas.
“Christmas will be prime rib, is the main thing — and hams,” Kurfurst said.
The focus tends to shift more toward steak and marinated items in the summer, he said, as consumers seek out meats for their barbecues.
The core business hasn’t changed much from when the shop opened in 1969, Kurfurst said, although the product selection has grown substantially — especially when it comes to processed products and marinated meats.
“Back when they opened up, you had beef, pork and chicken,” he said. “You had maybe one marinated item, our pepper steaks.”
Butcher Boys began making its own pepperoni and jerky using a single smokehouse in the late 1980s, he said, and they’ve grown to become some of the shop’s bestselling products.
Today, visitors to the shop will see a display case lined with items like stuffed pork chops, carne asada and marinated steak bites sitting alongside the plain cuts of meat.
Kurfurst said the change is primarily driven by consumer demand for more prepared options that they can cook at home quickly. Households often only had one working parent 50 years ago, he said, but today both parents are often rushing home from their jobs to prepare dinner.
The core trio of animal meats remains the same, but the shop also sells buffalo and lamb, and the custom butchering service brings in all kinds of unusual animals — service requests for bear, emu and cougar are not unheard of.
Kurfurst said he thinks the demand for local meat markets has been growing in recent decades due to consumer demand for high-quality meat products and local sourcing.
“It was a dying breed back in the late ’90s,” he said, “but I think (it’s resurging) with the public being more educated about meat, where it comes from and how it’s handled.”
Small shops like Butcher Boys can also offer the greatest degree of personalized service for small custom orders, he said — the shop operates on a scale of hundreds of pounds of meat, while major processors operate on a scale of millions.
Kurfurst said he expects to eventually buy the shop from his parents and become the full owner. The family owns the current Butcher Boys, he said, so another move is unlikely — although in the long term, he said he’d love to open a satellite location somewhere else in the county, like Salmon Creek.
