One of Sugar Mountain's most noteworthy items is its pre-bacon-a thick-cut slab of spiced pork belly that's preseasoned and cooked at home by the customer for four hours.
The rooms were coated from floor to ceiling for easy wash down and all the conduit and pipes are hidden in the walls, ceiling, and floors to make cleaning easy and enhance sanitation. All the metal work is stainless steel, fabricated by his son, Will. His son Ben carved all the granite sills for the doorways, high wear zones, as well as doing the marble work in the lavatory, all from Vermont stone.
But the design logic got even better when the 1,400-sq.-ft. facility used a central core for blast freezer space, with refrigerated areas adjoining and cool processing areas toward the outside.
“Energy costs are a big factor for processors so I designed our butcher shop so it needs no heating system despite our cold winters,” and likewise, in the warmer months it requires no air conditioning, he points out. “It gets its cool and warmth by using a giant flywheel or thermal mass.
“There are really no renderers in our area so we do natural composting of waste materials and return everything to restore the soil for farming.”
Sugar Mountain Farm uses what it terms “garden gleanings” in garden corrals to enhance the pigs’ diets with pumpkin, squash, turnips, corn and even cottage cheese and bread when the cold season requires more hay feed for the livestock.
But that’s just part of what makes this two-year-old processing facility unique. Over the past 14 years, they’ve also tapped into the trend toward natural meats and let their customers know up front how the animals are fed and raised. They even came up with a promotional logo called NoWeirdStuff.org to call attention to their entire process of raising pigs from pasture to fork. The company website SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershop goes to great length to inform their many store, restaurant and individual customers about their process as much as their final products.
Jeffries says the business operates under Vermont meat inspection and is limited to sales within the state and they don’t actually have a retail store. Stores and restaurants represent 88 percent of their sales and many customers who have eaten or purchased their meats at those locations track them down.
Sugar Mountain Farm contracts out its slaughter and smoking work to other plants, but says adding their own smoking operation is a possibility in the near future.
By far the biggest selling product is the ground pork, followed by Boston butt and Farm House sausage. They also do a steady trade in ham and pork chops as well as a spiced pork belly. You can find hot dogs and even corned pork selections in their product lineup.
Jeffries admits that his family dinner table has been the test market for a few dozen pork bellies until they hit on a recipe that includes a dry rub of maple sugar, salt and pepper, celery salt and cherry powder. He contends that the natural forage diet gives their bacon a sweeter flavor from the fat.
Sugar Mountain Farm represents probably one of the most naturally produced meat lineups in the region. They prefer to let customers know how they do it rather than go through the bureaucracy of subjectively defined labels like natural or organic.
The butcher shop is small and the workforce includes Walter, his son Ben, who works the farm and plant with him, and his wife, who also assists in the deliveries. But despite the company’s small size, their concept is massive.
All it took was a logical approach, working with what they had and a novel approach to starting the business and down-to-earth promotion. They used a KickStarter.com program to obtain part of the funding for the plant itself, with 369 participants who ventured $100 each to get things started. These supporters are from several states including Vermont and are willing to travel to West Topsham to purchase their meats. Funding also came from CSA pre-buyers who paid in advance for up to 30 years of pork, and loans from many individuals who helped to fund the butcher shop without any bank or government loans for grants.
One successful promotion is their “have your pig and eat it too” program, where customers put up money to buy entire animals or portions of them when they are ready for market. So laid-back is the small family farm concept that many customers actually come out to meet the delivery truck part way through the circuit to help save on costs and be assured timely delivery during the harsh Vermont winters.
By far, the bacon could almost be called “grass fed” and Jeffries believes that he could double his bacon sales if he had enough pigs. Sugar Mountain raises about 400 hogs a year and works with seven different genetic lines. He doesn’t do custom processing for other farmers or ranchers for bio-security reasons as well as the higher cost of insurance and more complicated regulations.
One of the more noteworthy items offered by the farm is a pre-bacon, a thick-cut slab of spiced pork belly that is already seasoned and only needs to be baked at home for four hours to an internal temperature of 145° F so it is fully cooked and can be sliced by the consumer to their own desired thickness.
Jeffries admonishes that he only wants to do what he can manage fully. He already seems to have mastered the art of having a solid reason for doing things in a natural, logical fashion. You can learn more about Sugar Mountain Farm and their journey to build their own on-farm inspected butcher shop at SugarMtnFarm.com/butcher shop. In mid-July, the company applied for federal inspection as its next big step.