NYC's First Fresh Mangalitsa

Heath Putnam Farms (bka* Wooly Pigs) has delivered its first load of fresh meat to the Northeast's DeBragga and Spitler.

Swiss Meat, the Western Hemisphere's lard-type slaughter and processing experts, cut and packed the pigs to spec.

Witte Bros Transportation, an LTL refrigerated trucking firm based in Troy, MO, picked up the Mangalitsa on Friday and got it delivered to NJ on Monday morning. If you ever run a meat company and need to get your meat moved around, I recommend you use Witte Bros. I've only had good results with them.

DeBragga - New York's Butcher - will distribute the meat to New York's best restaurants.

This is a major milestone for Wooly Pigs. It is a lot easier for a company like DeBragga to sell our product to chefs if it is never frozen.

You might think that chefs would look at the various options available to them (fresh/frozen, foreign/USA/same-state/local), the costs of those options and then, subject to some rational algorithm, choose the optimal items.

That's not at all how it works.

Instead, you find chefs with arbitrary rules, like "never buy frozen", "never buy from more than 60 miles away".

When chefs impose constraints like "never frozen" or "61 miles unacceptably far, 60 miles acceptable", they sometimes miss out on the best-tasting stuff, because frozen Mangalitsa (from far away) tastes a lot better than meat-type pork. A bunch of chefs at America's most esteemed restaurants agree with me.

Anyway, I'm happy that we've done our first successful load of chilled meat, because irrational or not, we have removed one major objection that Northeasterners might have to buying our products.

It wouldn't have been possible without Swiss Meat, Witte Bros and DeBragga all working together.


* bka= "better known as"