At Spragg’s Meat Shop, we pride ourselves on having the best local meats that Alberta has to offer available in our meat shops, and we also process all of our products on-site, right here in Rosemary, Alberta!
We believe that staying small and selling only to a local consumer base provides a better balance for the ecosystem. As a local meat processor, Spragg's Meat Shop is building a sustainable, dependable local food production chain. When you purchase Spragg's pork products, you know you are feeding your family the highest quality, ethically raised, local meat.
We wanted to give you a peek inside our processing facility in Rosemary and show you around:
To begin, it is essential to us to make sure that everything is done in a circle and we have a system for the meat to flow in one direction only in our processing facility. This is to ensure food safety and that we are avoiding any contamination of raw meat or allergens.
The meat starts in the loading dock, where it is brought through into our hanging cooler, where it is hung or stored in totes until we are ready to process it.
From the cooler, the meat is brought into the cutting room to be divided into the different cuts that we offer. We have band saws and table saws, and anything else you might need.
Once cut, anything fresh that does not need value-adding, such as pork chops, pork tenderloin or pork shoulder, go straight from the cutting room into the packaging room. Other items like sausages, hams and bacon that need more attention and flavourings added move into our value-adding section of the building.
In our value-adding room, we have grinders, sausage stuffers, bacon slicers, and all the homemade spices that you could possibly want. In this section is also the smokehouse and briner for continued value-added production.
The meat cuts are processed through the value-adding room and packaged on different days than others so that we avoid any cross-contamination of allergens when they meet in the same room for packaging. Everything is wiped down and cleaned regularly to ensure that no cross-contamination happens in our facility.
In the packaging room, we have recently upgraded our packing machine! No longer are the days when we wrap everything in the classic brown paper packaging, and we have even moved past the slow and cumbersome hand bagging and manual vacuum sealing method. We are now able to package multiple groups at a time, which saves us so much effort! (Though we do still use the other two methods from time to time).
Once weighed, packaged, and labelled, the meat is taken to either the coolers or the freezer. Our coolers get filled and then emptied on a weekly basis. When it’s ready to be sold, we ship it back out of the same shipping door and either placed in our Rosemary Meat Shop, or loaded into our truck and driven to the Calgary Meat Shop and Calgary Farmers’ Market. And that’s where you come into the process!
Watch as Bonnie takes us through the processing facility. (To keep the meat free from contaminants, we filmed this on a day when no meat was being processed in the facility (the only meat is the custom orders in our hanging cooler and sausages in our packaged cooler. Just look how shiny and clean everything is!):
At Spragg’s Meat Shop, we’re the farmer, the butcher and the meat shop! We are proud to be family-owned and locally run right here in Rosemary, Alberta. We produce the highest quality, ethically raised and sustainable meats. So stop in and get to know your butcher in Rosemary, or take a virtual step into our Calgary Meat Shop location and get to know our manager and local butcher, Leanna.
Stop by one of our two Calgary locations, including The Calgary Farmer’s Market or our Rosemary meat shop, to buy local, eat local and support sustainable farming!
SPRAGG’S MEAT SHOP CALGARY
9675 Macleod Trail SE
Calgary, AB, T2J 0P6
P: 403.255.1232
E: calgarystore@spraggsmeatshop.com
SPRAGG’S MEAT SHOP ROSEMARY
438 Centre St
Rosemary, AB, T0J 2W0
P: 403.378.3800
E: meatshop@spraggsmeatshop.com