Butchery has existed for ages, but it’s a skill that is rapidly falling out of fashion due to the prevalence of large-scale supermarkets with prepackaged meat — one could even say that meat cutting is a lost art. Lab coats, hair nets, and sharp knives are akin to an artist’s paintbrush, and the cold harvesting plant is the studio.
But Sierra Jepsen and her passion for agriculture and butchery is allowing her to forge a path in this industry. Her business, Butcher Solutions LLC, is building excitement for butchery again in the United States. Jepsen provides mobile butcher training and delivers easily accessible meat science education to processors nationwide, filling the knowledge gap that exists in today’s harvesting industry.
Laying her foundations
Jepsen grew up in Ohio, where her family farmed corn, wheat, and soybeans and ran a cow-calf operation. She describes her upbringing as “the whole Midwestern gamut.”
Jepsen envisioned herself as part of the business side of the farming operation, while her sister always wanted to work on the farm, which she now does full-time with their father. Jepsen’s mother is an ag safety specialist at The Ohio State University, making the whole family an integral part of the agriculture community.
As an outgoing and tenacious young person, Jepsen has always been involved and active in her 4-H and FFA clubs. Her awards reflect her dedication to these clubs, including an Agricultural Proficiency Award in beef production and recognition as the outstanding senior at her chapter, Amanda-Clearcreek FFA. On top of that, she was the 2012 state runner-up for Ohio in the Prepared Public Speaking CDE.
Despite the fact that Jepsen studied animal science, which generally leads to a career in veterinary medicine, she knew that wasn’t the future for her. Caring for sick animals wasn’t her area of interest, so she pursued a business degree with a minor in animal science at Ohio State. Jepsen adds that her various internships during her college years led her to her current career.
Her first internship was with Farm Credit, an opportunity that felt natural with their role in her and her family’s farming success and her interest in business as a career path. While the learnings were plentiful in this role, it helped her to define where her passions were.
“It was eye-opening to me how much I missed having beef cattle as a part of my every day. I realize I wasn’t going to be satisfied without having some connection with the beef cattle community,” she explained of her findings after a weekend of her internship spent serving steaks at the local county fair. The connection with the beef community that day is what lit her up.
Another summer internship led her to Dayton and Ohio’s Certified Angus Beef offices. She was tasked with helping the public relations team to share nutritional and other beef facts with consumers. She admits she thoroughly enjoyed the role but still craved more interaction and connection between farmers and ranchers along with the consumers she met during that internship.
Jepsen opted to spend her third internship at a Montana cattle ranch.
“I already worked with the consumer and the chef, so I wanted to go polar opposite and just work with the producer. I knew going into it that I didn’t want to be the person raising the cattle every single day, however I wanted to have this experience where I worked in the truest, most raw form of cattle ranching. I’ve experienced what it’s like to work in Montana in February and take care of the mama cow and calf. I knew that internship was going to be hard, and I was probably going to cry,” she said about the experience.
Not only where some tears shed — she even ended up breaking a bone — but her experiences allowed her the ability to truly share what the experience is like and it allowed her to know that role was definitely not for her.
What she did know was that she wanted to be connected to the beef cattle industry.
Meat science as the future
Along with all of the other internships Jepsen fulfilled during her college years, she also served a year as a National Beef Ambassador, a since sunsetted program run by the American National Cattlewomen to build advocates for beef. All of these activities and the lessons she learned led to a serendipitous moment when she took a meat science course instead of a popular beef production class. She had waited to take the beef production course her entire college career but when it was her turn to register, the course was full.
Her initial disappointment was replaced by a twinkle of interest, which led to what is now her career.
By just the second day of her meat science course, she realized meat science — a topic that covers the production, preparation, and preservation of meat — was the perfect way to connect the producer, who raises the animals, with the consumer, who enjoys the end product, all by what they see on their plate.
“I found it was the perfect middleman between what the beef producer does every single day and the way that we’re raising cattle in the states and around the world creating a high-quality product raised in a way that keeps animal welfare in mind. I want to make sure that the end customer sees the reflection of quality and care that the rancher put into it. There is often a disconnect between the rancher and the consumer as they don’t talk to each other often, and they don’t talk to each other in the same way. The butcher is talking to both of them daily and has to create this product that represents what the rancher has done and what the consumer expects,” she explained.
Through meat science and butchery, Jepsen found her story — or, more importantly, how she could connect her story with the consumer interested in purchasing and eating beef. Intending to head straight to graduate school (she would ultimately get her master’s at the University of Idaho), Jepsen found an opportunity at the University of Wyoming to coach the meat judging team while managing the university’s Cowboy Branded Meats program.
Meat judging, an extracurricular activity for youth through college age, allows teams to compete and share their knowledge about meat products while developing life skills such as analytical reasoning and impromptu public speaking. Areas of competition include identifying the best quality and yield of a meat carcass, accurately identifying specifications about cuts of meat, and classifying carcass animals based on which animal will produce the best meat product.
Coaching the meat judging team allowed Jepsen to travel the country while also getting college students excited about meat science.
Managing the branded meats program was an integral step in her journey to becoming a butcher because she was able to learn more about the meat products she already knew. Additionally, she and her students discovered there was more than just the traditional cuts; a wide variety of products could be produced, such as summer sausage and snack sticks. Her marketing skills selling these and other items to the community as fundraisers for the judging teams gave her the first step she needed into the marketing world of meat.
Four years into her career at the University of Wyoming, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, significantly impacting the judging team’s ability to practice and compete.
“We could no longer get into the big meat packing plants to practice or compete. We were going to some smaller meat packing plants and little local shops that would let us come and practice,” she said. “Every time we’d go into one of those little meat plants, I would ask the guys and gals that ran it how are you doing? And they always answered, we’re doing great; the business has never been better.”
Yet finding and retaining skilled labor was a problem for these meat shops. New hires often came from grocery stores, which didn’t feel right for many businesses because it took someone away from another needed area.
A business is born
Jepsen’s entrepreneurial spirit and passion for teaching about meat science were ramped up upon learning of this need in the industry. She wanted to instill in the next generation an enthusiasm for meat science.
“If I became a better butcher, I could train others to be butchers. And then wouldn’t it be great if I could go and work at a butcher school and then train other people to fill this need and relieve this labor issue?” she said.
After searching online for butcher schools, Jepsen realized they didn’t exist.
“You could take a workshop or a class at a university; you could go to a culinary program that might teach some butchery techniques. Some programs were up in Canada, but they were more two-year apprenticeships,” she said. “Of course, you could read a book or take an online butchery certification, but I thought you don’t need a certification to be a butcher. It’s just the interest and the skills.”
Her next step was to attend graduate school to learn the science behind butchery and then start a mobile butcher school, which she named Butcher Solutions.
“The traveling part of this idea is essential because I don’t own brick and mortar, and I don’t own a mobile slaughter unit. I have my knowledge and my knives, and those are the things that I travel with,” she said. “My business model is based on people needing training, and they need it now, and they can’t lose time sending their people away to get training.”
Jepsen offers butchery training and assesses facilities to determine if the current system is effective for the layout, manpower, and business demand. Jepsen’s petite size also serves as an asset to the business as she can identify how to operate a plant without having to rely on the pure physical strength of yesterday’s butchery.
“I can train a wide variety of people — from one person to 50 who are brand new or veterans who need to be updated on the latest science,” she said. “Sometimes a plant needs to start over with a new cut sheet completely, or they need somebody to figure out how the rail system works or what would make it more efficient.”
Once a plant realizes it needs help, it’s often a quick turnaround, so her schedule is usually booked two months out. Beyond that time frame, her schedule is wide open, making even the most seasoned entrepreneurs nervous about work opportunities and budgeting. The model is working, and Jepsen says this is what she plans to do for now — yet she does have ambitious goals to reach more processors nationwide.
Future endeavors include hiring regional butchers across the country, with staff specializing in various areas of the butchering field, such as harvesting expertise or processed meat experience. Jepsen believes that having specialists within the butchery community and business, with the added benefit of being spread across the country can make Butcher Solutions a more cost-effective and economical choice than a traditional school.
The day to day
Butcher Solutions’ goal is to train students in weeks or even days. The training can be done quickly with some tools and skills to improve upon.
“I hope that my butchery training is helpful and useful for folks,” Jepsen said. “My goal is to give them a couple of quick pointers that help increase speed, become more efficient, or change up their cut sheet to fit their needs better, and if down the road you have another idea or plan, great, I can come back and keep training. But ultimately, the hope is that we can train them very quickly, and then they can get on their way.”
One of Jepsen’s first clients, a butcher shop in Texas, called her to help resolve bottleneck issues. Their customer base was built on their high-quality product and the efficient harvest floor was already a base of success for this company. However, their fabrication room would often be backed up.
Jepsen noted the limited space in the fabrication room design, lack of training on new cuts, and language barriers. Three days of observation and training was all it took for Jepsen to identify the barriers to further success, and by the last day, she could stand back and give out tips and pointers.
“By the end of my visits, my goal is always to be a support staff member doing things like breaking down cardboard boxes, cleaning the dishes, or running products to a retail case. The way I know if I’m successful is if they no longer need me on the floor,” Jepsen said.
Another example of Jepsen’s work includes a newly opened meat processing plant with 22 butchers in the fabrication room, all with little to no butchery or knife skills training. These employees had worked in factory settings such as Nestle and Toyota, but no one had meat processing experience.
Initially, the training trip was scheduled for two weeks, but after assessment, more training was necessary, including learning the basics such as cut names and cookery methods. Jepsen would go out for a two-week training session and then return to train for only a day or two to cover items that proved difficult or needed tweaking.
A unique opportunity presented to Jepsen was a one-on-one training with two Arizona men whose wives called her to teach their husbands about backyard harvests of their beef cattle. The families would feed out two beef cattle and then butcher on their own. The group covered the harvest process when Jepsen flew to another job and returned a few days later to process the beef carcasses.
Entrepreneurial challenges and benefits
Jepsen admits that she thought this endeavor would be a challenge in an industry primarily made of men.
“I had to give myself a pep talk as I was building this business and calling butchers just as preemptive work to put this business together,” Jepsen said.
Jepsen discovered that her worries were unfounded and the opposite of what she expected. Her customers have shown they need her skills and are thrilled it exists. Jepsen says her size and gender are assets, and she can show how to handle a large carcass using gravity and other more suitable techniques for the average employee.
“There are ways to work smarter, not harder, in butchery, which is important for one’s longevity in this career as it’s tough work,” she said.
Long days spent on hard, cold concrete floors lifting heavy objects can wear on a body, so Jepsen teaches and trains how to prevent workplace injuries.
Jepsen goes international
Jepsen’s activities don’t just start and end in the butcher shop; they also take her internationally. Butchers of America, an organization founded by butchers to inspire butchers to serve the butchery community through networking and training, recently held tryouts for the U.S. team to attend the World Butcher Challenge. Jepsen earned herself a spot on the team.
Competitors worldwide are set to coverage in Paris in March of 2025, where each team is given a side of beef and pork, a whole lamb, and five chickens, which they must break down and process in three and a half hours. On top of that portion of the competition, Jepsen will compete in the Young Butcher competition, breaking down various primals on her own in two and a half hours.
Her enthusiasm for this industry is something she finds vital as she hopes to inspire other young people to choose it as a career.
“In other countries, like Germany, France, and Italy, being a butcher is an artisanal and prestigious job. There are crafty shops that are well-lit and beautiful and turn out really amazing products, and folks have worked there for generations. Why can’t we create that kind of excitement for the world of butchery in the United States?,” Jepsen asked.
With her focus on future generations and connecting consumers to agriculture, she is the first to point out how she forged her career path to fit her passions and that others can do the same.
“It’s fun that I got to create my dream job,” she said. “It’s a message to young people trying to find their dream job, saying they can make their own if they haven’t already found it. It does take a lot of honesty with yourself about truly knowing what makes you happy and what you enjoy doing versus what you think might make you happy and what you think you enjoy doing,” she shares with her on brand excitement.
Tiffany Selchow lives on a working cattle ranch in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. With a life entrenched in the Western lifestyle and agriculture, her goal is to share worthwhile, intriguing, and exciting stories of the rodeo world, ranchers and farmers, the outdoor lifestyle, and more.
The post How Sierra Jepsen is revitalizing America’s butchery industry appeared first on AGDAILY.
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