Whole Foods Butchers Train for 1,920 Hours First
According to the Bellevue Reporter, Whole Foods requires each staff butcher to complete a 1,920-hour training process, which lasts about two years. They start with clean-up duties, then the counter, then cutting duties, which starts with poultry, then pork, and finally beef. Talk about a meat doctorate. [via Girlhacker]
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8 Comments:
Seeing as there are whole college courses on how to properly kill and butcher animals for food production, that doesn't seem that bad. It's really a great way to train people who don't have a college degree or apprentice training how to properly butcher and know the quality of the meat they sell and advise customers of what they should ask for.
trialbyfood at 3:55PM on 01/05/09
they could condense it down to a 1-year training program if they had the butchers train 40 hours a week, eh?
BananaEsq at 5:38PM on 01/05/09
That's a pretty impressive number, but what matters more may be the stage of training achieved by the butcher helping you at any given time. Maybe it was just a fluke, but when I recently approached a WF meat counter and asked whether they sold suet, the first response I got was, "What's that?" I didn't exactly get the feeling I was in the hands of someone with 2,000 hours of butcher training.
Barry Foy at 7:09PM on 01/05/09
It would be nice if food specific (fish markets, butcher shops, produce stores) markets trained the employees for a while. I recently was at my fish market looking for some tiny scallops for some cheviche and the man pulled a bag from the freezer and insisted it was the scallops, I knew it was langosteen, and he thought he would argue a bit. I told him I would gladly take that for the price of the scallops. (that would have been great in my cheviche) Just then the store owner came in and said I was correct. The employee was a bit embarassed that I was right. Obviously he needed more training.
joanpieroni2 at 7:41PM on 01/05/09
@Barry Foy: I've had similar experiences at Whole Foods -- like when I asked for pork belly, and the guy confusedly picked up pieces of pork shoulder and other cuts until I spotted it myself and pointed. Maybe the people who actually run the meat counter are earlier in their training, and the butchers are in back?
Blake Royer at 9:05PM on 01/05/09
The article and item above specifically lists that the order is: clean-up, counter, then actual butchering, so you could be talking to someone who is still an apprentice at the counter. But it probably entirely depends on what their staff make-up is at the time... full butchers probably work the counter too when needed (customers first!).
Lilly Tao at 2:57AM on 01/06/09
Wow! That makes the number of credit hours I am putting in for my M.S. look rather pitiful.
FrostyGhost at 2:08PM on 01/06/09
I've love to train as a butcher and I live in Austin, the headquarters of Whole Foods. Unfortunately, they've laid people off nationwide and aren't hiring anyone now. There are some meat-cutting schools; there is one in Phoenix I'm looking at. The others are: two in Oklahoma, one in Utah, one in Michigan, one in Wisconsin, one in Puerto Rico, and a couple in Canada. I really think locally produced meat will be a market in the future. Now if I can just figure out how to enter that market.
chascates at 6:36PM on 01/06/09