From COVID outbreaks among workers at meat processing plants to delays in trucking and transportation, our food supply has been one of the most visible examples of the pandemic’s wide reach. At New York Butcher Shoppe, with local locations in Dilworth, Indian Land, and now Cornelius, co-owner Antonio Tillery shares that the purveyor of high-end meat has been constantly adjusting by changing prices and reworking their margins to adapt to the latest supply chain disruption. One bright spot, however, has been customers’ willingness to shift focus from the usual cuts of ribeye and New York strip steaks to offerings like flank steak.

We spoke with Tillery to learn more about what life has been like in the meat business over the past few years. (This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity).

Unpretentious Palate: What supply chain issues have you been facing in the meat retail business?
Antonio Tillery: It’s been ongoing for the better part of a few years now. The supply chain issues really started hitting home three or four months into the COVID pandemic. After all the restaurants shut down, there were a lot of challenges with everything from labor to logistics to processing plants getting outbreaks of COVID and having to completely shut down.

We saw it all across the spectrum, from beef to poultry to pork — you name it. It wasn’t any one particular category that got hit. The part that surprised me the most is it didn’t stay fixed with any one category of product. For example, initially we saw a lot of problems sourcing particular types of seafood that might come out of Asia or Vietnam, like crab meat, for example. A lot of the world’s crab meat comes from that part of the world. We saw initially prices as much as double, and then the product just was not available at all. So we had to make adjustments in what we were offering because of that.

As the pandemic progressed, grocery stores started running out of food. They started having shortages on everything from chicken to toilet paper. A lot of the meat that we sell outside of the beef is sourced more locally and not on such a large scale, like some of the big box grocery stores. We didn’t have as much of a struggle as most of the big box grocery stores did, which helped us. We were able to have a constant supply of those products for folks that like to shop with us, and they were able to depend on us to make sure that we always had those things.

As the pandemic got deeper, things like logistics started to become a challenge, and shipping became a challenge. Prices started to go up, particularly in the beef market first. We deal with only high quality grades of beef. We don’t deal with grocery store-grade beef. As restaurants started to reopen, manufacturers and producers, processors of high end beef weren’t able to keep up with the rapid pace of restaurants reopening. So it created this huge surge in demand, which spiked prices in a big way. In some of the categories, such as as USDA Prime, we saw prices increase as much as 60 to 70 percent over the prior year, which was pretty nuts. In some cases, prices are still hovering at that level.

It’s been a pretty complex challenge. It’s not been any one thing; it’s not like we’re a trucking industry and gasoline or diesel prices surge, we have to sort that out. It just it keeps changing; every single week it’s something different. It requires us to be on our heels every day.

UP: Are customers ordering more lesser-known, but still delicious, cuts of meat now that things are harder to get? Are you encouraging that?
AT: We do a lot of fabrication in-house, so we see a big shift to cuts like Denver steaks and hangers and skirts and flanks and things like that. The price increase on the more traditional things like ribeyes and New York strips and tenderloins obviously has forced people to look at alternatives. But the good part about us being able to offer those things and be what we truly try to be, your neighborhood butcher, is that we can educate our consumers on what’s available and how to use the product. That’s been a silver lining — we get to create those relationships and teach people about new things and they become big fans, and then they learn something that they didn’t know existed.

UP: Do you think that this change in what cuts of meet people are comfortable cooking with will be a longterm one?
AT: I think you’ll see as people become more educated, it becomes another alternative for them. It’s not the usual New York strip — I always get New York strip, but now I’ve been turned on to something else. I think that’ll have some staying power. We also have the advantage of the wine bar. We serve the food in the wine bar, too. Our most popular dish is our steak plate. A lot of times, we’ll use those alternative cuts on that dish and we introduce it to people that never knew it existed and they become huge fans that way. All of a sudden they start buying it because they tasted it in that very popular dish. So yeah, I think there’s some staying power with those, I guess you would call them alternative because they’re not mainstream today, but absolutely.

UP: In terms of pricing, how are you adjusting prices in terms of what you pass on to the customer versus cutting costs in-house? How are you managing the unexpected surge in costs?

AT: Well, the good news is it’s not unexpected anymore. We see it, right? We know it’s there. It’s a very real thing. We literally have to manage cost every time we get a delivery of something; every time we serve something, we have to assess what we’re paying for it. We have to assess the ideal margins for us to remain a profitable business, and how much of those margins we are able to cut into to pass on to the customers. Obviously, we don’t want to pass on a full uptick in cost.

It’s a balancing game between margins and what we call penny profit. Say you take a widget and your typical margin on a widget is 25 percent, and that 25 percent yields you a dollar. Then that widget’s cost goes up. If my margin continues to be 25 percent, my penny profit becomes a $1.25 because of the increased costs. I have some room to wiggle and maybe reduce our margins a little bit, and we still get the penny profit. The problem with that is that the cost is not limited to the product that we’re sourcing. The cost is across the board. We’re seeing costs on transportation go up, we’re seeing costs on supplies go up. We’re seeing costs in labor go up. Everything is going up. So we have to be very disciplined about how we calculate those costs and the pricing and do the best job that we can to balance things.

UP: So for the customer, does that mean your meat prices changing constantly?
AT: Absolutely, yeah. All the prices don’t change every week because sometimes the market price of something will sit pretty stable for a few weeks, so those prices don’t change. We are a commodity business, so if you think of something like gasoline, how prices are always changing, our prices are the same way.

UP: How have customers responded to that fluctuation in price? 
AT: For the most part, our customers are understanding and our guests are very loyal in the sense of they frequently shop with us, and so they see the fluctuations. As they see things go up, they also see them go down. I mean, in the last 60 days, we’ve seen a huge relief in USDA prime price to the point where customers have even said, wow, I haven’t seen that price in six-plus months. That’s encouraging, it’s a good thing — that means that they’re noticing and they’re paying attention.

UP: What do you suggest for people who generally eat a New York strip but want to try something new?
AT: There are lot of underrated cuts that people are just not used to seeing, like teres majors or flank steaks. I think flank steak’s one of the things that I love the most, because it’s so versatile and you can use it in so many different ways. There’s a lot of really cool things you can do with it in terms of marinading or grilling it whole, or slicing it thin or making tacos with it, or just eating it as a steak. It’s a good value kind of meat, but when you get a really high quality steak, it stands right up there with something like a New York strip or a ribeye in terms of flavor. Granted, it’s not going to be as tender as a filet is or a ribeye, but the flavor is is pretty on point. It’s pretty impressive.