Meet Modern Farmer’s Guest Instagrammer: Fleishers Craft Butchery

Back in 2004, when Josh and Jessica Applestone opened a butcher shop in Kingston, New York, they helped launch a rebirth of a dying art and reinvent the meat business by working with local farms that raised animals on pasture without hormones or antibiotics. Among the many folks who learned butchery skills under their tutelage was Ryan Fibiger, who with Paul Nessel, founded Craft Butchery in 2011.

The two companies have since merged under one banner: Fleishers Craft Butchery, with four butcher shops located in Kingston, Brooklyn, and Greenwich and Westport, Connecticut. They also have a restaurant in Westport, Fleishers Craft Kitchen, and a processing facility and commercial kitchen in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. The company has a line of wholesale packaged goods as well, and currently employs 65 people. (The Applestones have since left the company to open The Applestone Meat Company, in Accord, New York.)

Ryan Fibiger, butcher and CEO of Fleishers Craft Butchery, behind the counter at the shop in Westport, CT.

“I was a Wall Street drop out with a burgeoning food obsession. Having sat behind a desk for ten years, I was looking for something more physical to occupy my hands. I’ve always been a tactile learner, and I immediately fell in love with the act of butchering,” says Fibiger, 37, the company’s CEO. “The fact that butchering is also profoundly emotional and intellectual was totally unexpected, and I think that’s what ultimately pushed me over the edge into obsession.”

Fibiger says while he learned butchering from “scratch” and is still learning, creating a viable business model “has proven to be more difficult and much more important to our current and future success. If we’re really going to change the way that people eat meat and disrupt the mess that is our industrial agriculture system, we need to get serious about how our business works,” he says. “I’ve applied a lot of my previous experiences in financial services to reinvent the butcher shop business model. It’s not perfect, but our thorn in the side of the big agriculture players is getting ever larger.”

He’s making that happen along with Samantha Garwin, 29, of Norwalk, Connecticut, the company’s COO; Paul Nessel, 41, of Wilton, Connecticut, their head butcher; and Christophe Hille, 43, of Brooklyn, New York, their CFO.

Paul Nessel, the company’s head butcher.

The company continues to work with small, sustainable farmers. Fibiger says, “it’s the right thing to do. It’s better for our customers, the farmers, the community, the land, and more.” They are also continuing to train others in the art of butchery. For Fibiger, continuing this practice is important.

“If we want to increase the market share of pasture-raised meat from 5 percent to 10 percent-plus, we need more people out there preaching our message. We’re training meat missionaries,” he says.

CFO Christophe Hille.

COO and butcher Samantha Garwin.