The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Equipment => Topic started by: Womble on December 15, 2019, 07:30:30 pm
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The butcher just told us that he's labelled our mutton up as lamb because it was too much effort to re-program the printer >:( . It's not a disaster since he's boxed the mutton separately, but I certainly can't sell it like that, as there's no way that people will be able to remember what is what.
So, I need your ideas folks. How can I relabel / overlabel / mark the mutton to show clearly what it is? The meat is already in the freezer, so whatever I use needs to work on already frozen polythene packets.
Thanks! :thumbsup:
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We have not found a solution to this except to overbag.
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marker pen ????,
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Tell your butcher it's no use and get him to find a solution
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labelling mutton as lamb is an offence under the labelling regulations if it for sale to general public but may not apply if this was slaughter,cut freeze and pack of a whole animal. But if it was too much trouble to change the labelling machine then what else is to much trouble for this individual? Find another butcher and/or talk to trading standards.
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You can get freezer labels from places like Label Planet. We got a big box of the LL08 (8 to a page) and used the settings in Word, which have a load of preset sizes including this, to create a template. The labels can then be printed in a laser printer and stuck on to the packaging. We've found they stick well and don't fall off and the type is reasonably persistent even after a year in the freezer and lots of moving around. You can even stick them to stuff that is already frozen, but you do need to wipe the surface dry and get it as flat as possible.
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Tell your butcher it's no use and get him to find a solution
You don’t rear livestock, do you Annie ;) :D
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labelling mutton as lamb is an offence under the labelling regulations if it for sale to general public but may not apply if this was slaughter,cut freeze and pack of a whole animal. But if it was too much trouble to change the labelling machine then what else is to much trouble for this individual? Find another butcher and/or talk to trading standards.
The problem is that the best butchers are fantastically busy all the time, so making them spend time faffing around with a non-standard label is unrealistic.
Couldn’t get my excellent butcher up north to do it, although he would stick my labels on for me if I gave them to him, preprinted, which worked well enough for the occasions when I had a surplus to sell.
And can’t get the very excellent butcher down here to do it either. He will collect a bullock from the farm, load it and drive it 40 minutes to the abattoir in his cattle wagon and charge me only £25+vat for that, so it’s not that he isn’t accommodating. But handling livestock, making sure the livestock arrives at the abattoir unstressed, cutting up the meat, making sausages, that is all stuff he understands and is like the breath in his body to him.
Adjusting a computer program to make new labels that are different to the ones all five butchers use, day in day out and have done for years... that’s not on the same planet. It might take him as long as it would to cut up 5 lambs just to do that! It might take me as long as it would take him to cut up 5 lambs just to do that! Lol.
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Yup. Let me tell you a story about these sheep then....
Our local abbatoir closed last year, which leaves us with not a right lot of choice locally. The one we switched to has its own on-site butchers, who are very good. However, they are also fantastically busy and I have to face facts that even though I've just paid them over £700, that's still a very small account for them.
Work has been mad for me this year and I hung back on booking this batch in at the abbatoir because I never knew from one week to the next whether I'd be travelling. Then, once I did get a settled spell, my car broke down and took 3 weeks to fix.
As a result, when I did manage to phone them, I'd hit their Christmas rush, and it was 6 weeks before they had a slot free :o . So, I'm very lucky to be getting these back before Christmas at all, and am not in a position to argue about labelling!
At least these guys are organised and haven't lost half the meat, as happened when we sent porkers to their main competitor in September :-[ .
At the risk of hijacking my own thread, we urgently need to get a network of mobile slaughterhouses going in Scotland, otherwise smallholding just isn't going to be feasible any more. In the meantime, it's a seller's market and I have little alternative to taking the meat I'm given, labelled or not!!
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Local dispatching and processing of small scale livestock is becoming an increasing problem. Particularly at Christmas. We have had similar problems with our geese. Many smallholders have to have a second income and juggling the demands of an employer and the smallholding sometimes becomes almost impossible.
Womble - I don't have a solution but I know how you feel and you have my sympathy. :hug:
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We have not found a solution to this except to overbag.
Maybe I should have explained what I meant by “overbag”.
Put each of the bags labelled by the butcher into another bag, labelled by you.
For people on a very small scale I am sure this will be cheaper and simpler than paying the butcher to update their labelling systems. (And that’s if they can update the basic meat types themselves.)
We started to use an internal overbagging system, where anything that’s from an older animal (so needs a longer, slower cook), gets overbagged in a blue bag. We don’t need to label the blue bags, you can see the butcher’s label through it for the species, the cut and the weight, and the blue tells you it’s mutton not lamb, old cow not veal, or whatever.
We are too disorganised to make this work, sadly, but it was an elegant system! Lol.
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Provide him with the labels
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Tell your butcher it's no use and get him to find a solution
You don’t rear livestock, do you Annie ;) :D
And that matters - why?
Surely it is against the law to mis label anything, whether it is meat or a set of accounts?
If I were to prepare accounts for you dated 31st December 2017 when it whould be 2019, you'd seek recompense/relabelling at the least, surely?
If teh butcher concerned cannot be bothered or doesn't have the knowledge to change his machone I'm damned sure David could. Perhaps a bit of barter could be used?
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If you are selling directly to people you know and talk to, overbagging like Sally describes would IMO be the easiest and quickest. After all you customer want mutton rather than lamb?
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Tell your butcher it's no use and get him to find a solution
You don’t rear livestock, do you Annie ;) :D
And that matters - why?
Experience
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:sofa:
Now now folks, let's not go there please!!
Yes, in hindsight I should have provided my own labels for the butcher to put on, but he's an hour away and I would have had to make a special trip.
I think overbagging might well be the answer. There's a catering supplies place just round the corner from my office, so I'll pop in there and ask if they have different colours of bag available. Thanks folks! :thumbsup:
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Stop press! I collected everything this morning. Because it had all been frozen at low humidity, and because it's still below freezing here today, we were able to open the mutton boxes and write "mutton" on all the labels with a sharpie. Nice and simple, and hopefully foolproof!!
It's such a relief to have everything 'safely gathered in', so I can now get it out to people before Christmas and I certainly won't be leaving it this late again.
Thanks for your help everybody! :thumbsup:
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Tell your butcher it's no use and get him to find a solution
You don’t rear livestock, do you Annie ;) :D
And that matters - why?
Experience
A trifle condescending - unexpected from you. And not indeed the facts of the case anyway. Admitted;y a number of years ago, and we had an excellent butcher who did as we asked.