Thomas Coss’s journey started behind the meat counter at a grocery store.
It continued at high-end steakhouses, a charcuterie course in France, a butcher shop in Germany and a small business doing pop-up butchery workshops.
Today, the journey resides at Carnation Farms, where Coss has landed after years of refining his craft.
Coss started as the full-time Carnation Farms butcher in January. His house-made products — pastrami, mortadella, roast beef, bacon, Paris ham and more — have enhanced the offerings of the farmstand. He has also been doing weekend pop-ups at the farmstand, serving up dishes like pastrami sandwiches, smash burgers and cheesesteaks, which are known to sell out fast on a nice day.
Before Carnation Farms, Coss was running his own business, Harvest and Slaughter, where he held butchery classes followed by multi-course meals. These classes made their way onto the Carnation Farms events calendar, and Coss was introduced to Chef Kristen Schumacher and the rest of the farm’s culinary team.
“As we started talking about our ethos and how we view food and how we view regenerative farming and sustainable sourcing of proteins, ethical slaughter, all those things, we discovered that our ambitions were aligned,” Coss said.
Coss is still teaching workshops at Carnation Farms, the most recent being a pork butchery workshop. For $300 per ticket, attendees got to learn how to break down a whole pig, enjoy several pork-centered courses and take home cuts of meat to cook themselves.
Coss said he is getting customers used to seeing these value-added products before, hopefully, building out a full butcher counter in the farm stand. There, he would like to sell more uncommon products.
“Once I can build trust with the community, and once I can build a reputation as somebody who produces good food and sources in a sustainable and ethical way, I think that people will allow me to kind of coerce them into trying something like a blood sausage or a head cheese,” he said.
Coss said a butcher counter “just makes sense” because the farm already raises its own livestock, like lamb and cattle, but he also thinks it will benefit other local farms.
“We also want to be a good resource for our neighbors,” he said. “We’re not going to raise poultry. We’re not going to raise any hogs anytime soon. So the idea is to source as locally as we can … The rising tide raises all ships.”
Eventually, when the farm has its own butcher counter, Coss will receive full carcasses and break them down himself to sell different cuts, including custom cuts.
Before Coss can do that, however, a lot has to happen behind the scenes. He noted that the farm’s agriculture and livestock teams are essential to the success of a potential butcher counter.
“We wouldn’t have any of these animals if it wasn’t for our livestock team,” he said. “I don’t work in a vacuum. This is not my butcher shop. This is our butcher shop.”
Sustainable butchering
While having an on-site butcher counter will give Coss more product options, he noted that sustainability will remain at the forefront of his decision-making on what to sell, which could limit availability. For example, he said, Teres major steaks are a popular cut of meat, but each animal only produces two.
“Am I going to sell those? Of course, I’m going to sell them,” he said. “But there’s only two per animal, so if somebody comes in and they’re like, I’m having a bunch of people over, I want four Teres majors, well, it’s two whole animals, right there … I’m probably not going to have that for them.”
This scenario represents scarcity, one of three tenets of Coss’s sustainability practice. The other two, he said, are transparency and accessibility.
In offering several different meats and cuts, Coss hopes to make products accessible to a range of budgets and tastes.
He added that, if he doesn’t have the cut someone is looking for, “that’s not the end of the conversation, it’s the beginning.”
“That starts the conversation about how you can move into a different part of the animal, or a different cut,” he said. “It just helps highlight and educate how you have to be malleable, and you have to be flexible with what it is that you want to make in order to support a sustainable system.”