“I haven’t really had anybody come in, ‘oh this price is this,’ or, ‘why.’ Everyone’s pretty much, ‘hey, can we get some more steaks down here,’ or ‘can we get this.’ We’re just trying to figure all this out. It’s only been but a month and a half,” Brandon Dukate, an employee at Heritage Craft Butchers, said.  

From Marianna, Pelvania, Heritage Craft Butchers set up a retail store in Waynesburg July 12. Now about two months into the business, co-owners Bob Von Scio and Jered White report the shop is proving its keep. 

“It’s a little slower than our original projections, but it covers its cost,” Von Scio said. “It’s a profitable location for us, and it requires relatively little work on our part. It’s sort of like, we make 50 pounds of a particular sausage, 10 or 15 go down there, I drop it off and it goes out the door. It’s been really low friction.”

While the main location in Marianna is where the craft meat experiences occur, the Waynesburg location is to draw customers from grocery store chains. 

“Down there is basically just a retail location in a high traffic location with a unique product differentiated from Giant Eagle, Aldi, Walmart and whatever food retailers are there,” Scio said.

Since the knowledge and expertise are all in the main location, the Waynesburg location does not sell all the unique products the butchers offer. While the location does receive some items such as veal meatballs and bison (the bison is a limited time item) from Marianna, the location provides the everyday dairy and meat needs. 

“The knowledge base is located here [in Marianna], so if you come in and ask about a chorizo asturiano versus a morcela chorizada, like we can talk at length about what those products are,” Von Scio said. “Some of them are a really small batch, it might be a one-off type of thing, and it wouldn’t make sense to make a training regimen or someone down there [at Waynesburg] to necessarily know 300 products and the origin, the history and the cultural significance of those products. Whereas if someone [just] wants a steak, local eggs, high-quality milk, stuff like that, it’s more of a… I don’t want to say a convenience store, but it is a store with a limited selection of predictable everyday needs.”  

So far, the Waynesburg store’s best-selling product is their milk, said Dukate.

“I just say it’s kind of like Wendy’s melted Frosty because it’s thick but white,” Dukate said. “It’s not really thick, but then you feel it. A local guy from Kirby, Mt. Morris area, Andy Fox does all that stuff.”

However big or small the product selection is at Heritage Craft Butchers in Waynesburg, customers can always be sure that the products will be fresh from Greene County. 

“Ask your Giant Eagle butcher where that meat came from,” Jared White said. “They’ll be like, ‘a Cisco truck? I don’t know.’ Some of these animals, if you were interested, we could tell you the name of the animal, but a lot of people don’t really want to hear that. Animals with names I feel are a little happier and maybe taste better than animals that came off a feedlot and known by a number. These animals are well cared for and we curate our farmers locally as friends and they’re good people. We support them, and they make a really surprisingly good product.”