A Cut Above the Rest

Thomson’s Custom Meats is a local institution, but its owners are looking to the future

By Mandi Donohue

For Chris and Diana Thomson, owners of Thomson’s Custom Meats in Twisp, retirement has been calling for quite some time.

“We haven’t had three days off in a row in 20 years,” he says. “If we had a week off, it might be a whole different ball game.”

Diana and Chris Thomson have built their business through hard work and investing in upgrades and equipment.

Like many small businesses in the Methow Valley that have developed a reputation for high-quality local products, Thomson’s Custom Meats has relied on the exhaustive—and exhausting—devotion of its owners. The transition dilemma—to sell, or simply close the doors—is one that faces many of those owners as they contemplate what’s next in their lives.

Since 2007, the Thompsons have been selling customized and retail meat out of their 8000-square-foot facility on Twisp-Carlson Road. It’s truly been a labor of love. Lots of labor. And after investing hundreds of thousands of

dollars into the business, running all aspects of it themselves, the couple is now feeling the fatigue.

The “for sale” sign is up on the door of Thomson’s Custom Meats— with mixed emotions from its owners.

“Diana likes it and loves the people,” Chris says. “We gotta really good customer base so she kinda feels on the fence about letting it go and letting them down. I tell her eventually we have to live our life too because you don’t live forever.”

“Diana broke her back two years ago and my right shoulder needs to have surgery, it’s just cramping bone on bone, and then this other shoulder hurts. I mean, I’ve done it for 38 years and we’re just tired,” Chris adds.

How do you walk away knowing the legacy you’ve created could end at a moment’s notice? How can you not walk away when your body has nothing left to give?

Chris continues, “I’ve been working almost every night, seven days a week, most nights till midnight,” Chris says. “Then two or three in the morning I have to get up and start over the next day and I am burned out. I am tired.”

People have mentioned buying the 3-acre property from the Thomsons, but not for the same use.

“I just don’t want to see it go away,” Chris says. “To me it’s important, I can’t be the only one, I hope, because we need this in our community.”

A long legacy

Thompson’s Custom Meats not only does retail sales (one record-breaking weekend last year selling as much as $40,000 worth of goods from the tiny cold case) but also sells various items to local businesses— Everything from Canadian bacon to East 20 Pizza, to sausages for The Mazama Store’s brat night. “It’s fun to do that kind of stuff for people. We do all the

restaurants for the most part.” Local businesses like Old Schoolhouse Brewery use walk-in cooler spaces to store barreled beer.

Aside from restaurant clientele, Chris also processes the meat for deer hunters every fall. Without Thomson’s, it is uncertain where the deer hunters would go. “There are guys that have been bringing deer here for the last 67 years, through several family generations,” Chris says.

Annually, Thomson’s processes an average of 300 to 350 deer during hunting season. Then there are the elk, moose, and bear that also come in. The year after the 2014 fires, more than 600 deer were processed.

“In this valley, the direction people are gonna go with their families, with their mini-farms and the quality of the food, you have to have a meat plant to process your stuff,” Chris says. “The one in Tonasket burned down. Okanogan Custom Meats, they closed that one down. There’s no place for people to go anymore that do what we do.”

From the start, Chris has felt a connection to the area and this business. “Years ago as a little kid, my friend lived across the street [from what is now Thomson’s] when I was nine or ten years old. We’d walk across and then hang out here. Some of the meat guys would kinda let us walk through and we fished up behind it... so this place means a lot to me.”

The building was built in the early 1900s and since the 1940s, the shop was solely responsible for all meat production throughout the valley. After butchering, the meat would be hauled down and distributed to surrounding grocery stores in the area. It’s a business that has provided jobs for almost

a century. “God, every time you talk to someone in the valley you hear ‘Oh, I used to work up there,” Chris says.

Chris is a wealth of knowledge about the store’s rich history, even starting from its very early beginnings. Looking through old historical photos, he knows all of the names, dates, and faces of previous owners and the names of many who used to work there.

The business started as Methow Valley Meats and prior to the Thompson’s purchase, there were many owners and a time where the business had a poor reputation. To disassociate with that reputation, they had to change the business name. “Customers lost their meats, their deer was stolen, it was terrible... so I had to change the name. But it needs to go back to Methow Valley Meats because it’s been that name for 100 years.”

True partnership

Chris and Diana met on a blind date when she was 26. Diana was raised on the East Coast, went to school in California, and afterward made her way north to Seattle. Chris came from the grocery scene in Seattle working for Town & Country Foods and supplying to various markets in the area.

Having spent summers in the Methow Valley as a kid with his friend, Chris loved the area. When he inquired at the IGA in Winthrop about a job, they asked him to start in two weeks. Diana joined him three months later with their children.

“Mike Walker’s dad, who was retired at the time, spent a couple of weeks in there with me cutting beef ‘cause that’s what he had done,” Chris says. “He was a meat cutter and then the store got built up as he went. That’s how the IGA got its start. And he showed me how to do that.”

Chris spent five years at the IGA and then moved to Hank’s Market in Twisp, where he worked for fifteen years as the Meat Manager.

Later on, it was Lauren Cannon, who started Savannah Meats in Arlington, who taught Chris the ins and outs of charcuterie, or the smoking of meats. From there, he got another ham recipe “from an old guy in Spokane that owned a place called Bonanza Meats. I got his signature recipe and that’s what I use on my Canadian bacon, on my old-fashioned bone-in hams,” Chris says.

“I love making the sausages,” Diana says. “For me, the chicken sausage is my favorite. I love the Thai Chicken and Chicken Gruyere.”

High hopes for transition

Chris will be the first to tell you, he is a better butcher than a businessman. And finding and keeping good employees has been a challenge from day one.

From the start, the couple has done everything themselves, “Being an employee is easy. You come in, put your time in and go. But when [as the owner] you have to worry about all of the mechanical rooms, all the ordering, all the special ordering, it’s too much. You have to be at five different places all the time. It takes a lot.”

“It’s not a get-rich thing,” Chris says. “It’s a lot of physical work, a lot of lifting— you gotta be kinda proud or happy about what you’re doing more than looking for the dollar.”

Since buying the business, the Thomson’s have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on upgrades and equipment. They have grown the business to such an extent, and created such inherent market value, that to

find a buyer could prove difficult. “Me and Diana don’t have money. Everything we have is in this building. We can’t afford to completely hand it over.”

For someone with business sense, the possibilities are endless. Chris has high hopes for someone in their 30’s— younger, energetic, and passionate — to buy the business. There are people that know a lot more than I do that could come in here and do a lot better job than I do. But just finding them, I don’t know how.”

Chris has reached out to TwispWorks, in hopes of exploring a community venture. “We don’t have a lot of good jobs in this valley. So from that aspect, it’s really important to keep it going,” he says.

“We just need to get the word out and I think between the community and TwispWorks, we can still keep this thing here and have it under somebody else’s name.”

“We can come in and train people,” Chris adds. “And there’s all kinds of meat-cutting schools that are going on that could happen here. There’s just all kinds of stuff you could do if you have a younger person here with the right energy.”

“I wouldn’t mind gifting some of the business away as long as we have enough for retirement. We just want time to take a vacation,” Chris says. “I just don’t want this place to go away.”