HONEST MEATS SINCE 2002

Behind the Slogan

“Honest Meat,” the sign outside our butchery, is a commitment to our customers and to the local farmers we source from.

Foothills started as a small, family farm. We learned firsthand the struggles that farmers face when it comes to selling their livestock and making an honest living that will support a family.

We saw how processing facilities made more money in a day than we were making in eight months of raising an animal. We watched our healthy livestock that we raised with a high quality of life leave our farm without receiving a promise that their death and the meat we would receive in return would be carried out with our same level of integrity. And it cost us the same amount regardless of whether the facility did a good job of processing and packaging our meat. We didn’t even have a way of knowing whether the meat we received was in fact from our farm.

As food suppliers, we wanted more control over our process, from raising animal to putting supper on the table.


Enter:

Foothills Butcher Shop

In 2013, we opened our butcher shop as a direct response to all the problems we had experienced. Our method of ordering in massive, raw chunks (called “beef quarter” or “half a pig”) provides our local farming community with honest pay for their hard work and for their high standards of raising livestock.

Today, our butcher shop processes all of the meat we serve at our restaurant Foothills Grange. Soon we will be opening two new locations in Black Mountain and Old Fort, and customers can be sure that our little butcher shop will still process the meat for all three restaurants.

A Note on Regenerative Agriculture

We support regenerative agriculture, which is the way the United States used to manage land. This method of farming allows us to eat healthier meat and actually restore soil that has been degraded by bad land management and farming practices.

An overwhelming number of farmers believe that it is the only long-term solution to the food crisis that we face. Luckily we’ve made advances in animal medicine that allow us to make better choices for livestock’s health, which ultimately makes regenerative agriculture more possible than ever before.

 

We’re makin’ Feel-Good Food

It is a new social construction to believe that meat is bad for humans and the planet, and one that points solely to the negative effects of large-scale, industrial farming and chemical use.

As meat sellers, we feel it is part of our duty to help our customers understand the importance of regenerative agriculture, livestock’s integral role in it and to ultimately feel good again about eating meat.

We want our customers to feel good again about eating meat.

It’s our job to help all of our customers appreciate all of the parts these animals give us and the hard work farmers and butchers put forth so that we can put supper on the table.
— Casey McKissick, Owner