What does this big machine have to do with local food?

Introducing City Market’s new cryovac machine!

This machine is destined to change the types of local meats City Market sells, while simultaneously eliminating waste!

Here’s how:

Most of City Market’s meats come in bigger cuts than you would ever want to buy: In the meat cooler out back, we have a whole shoulder of beef from LaPlatte River Angus weighing around 50 pounds. On the smaller side, we get in whole chickens from Maple Wind Farm weighing in at 4-6 pounds. We then have 2 employees who cut the meat into the steaks and cuts that you buy at the meat counter.

Until we got the cryovac machine, we were packaging the meat on Styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic like this:

Local Beef packaged in the old Styrofoam trays

The Styrofoam and the plastic wrap both had to be thrown away.

Now that we have the cryovac machine, we can seal all our meats in air-tight plastic seals like this:

Jamie Lewis, Meat and Seafood Manager, with some Cryovaced chicken.

The cryovac packaging is recyclable (and BPA free!), and it eliminates the use of Styrofoam which lasts forever in the landfill.

The cryovac machine also allows us to sell more local meat!

Maple Wind Farm Local Pastured Chicken

Maple Wind Farm raises poultry in Huntington. You may have met farmers Beth and Bruce at the Burlington Farmers’ Market some Saturday morning. The farm raises only 1,000 chickens out on pasture, moving them to fresh grass each day. The birds get up to 70% of their diet straight from grasses, bugs, earthworms, etc, making a delicious meat that is low in saturated fat, and high in Omega-3’s.

Here’s where the cryovac comes in: Beth and Bruce only sell whole birds, and with each bird running around 5 pounds, at $5-6 per pound that means each chicken would cost our customers $25-30. That’s a lot of chicken and a lot of money. Until last week, we weren’t able to sell their chickens. Most people looked at 5 pounds of meat (and, let’s be honest, the $30 price tag) and just walked away.

With the cryovac machine, we can package cuts of meat (wings, drumsticks, breasts, etc) and sell smaller amounts of chicken, allowing more people to buy local pastured chicken!

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