Making a Killing With Elk Burgers

The Meating Place has grown from processing game for hunters into a thriving cafe and shop

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In his teens, Casey Miller spent his afternoons as a “cleanup kid,” scrubbing bloody butcher blocks, grinders, and pans at the Meating Place, a shop near Portland, Ore., that processed game for hunters and livestock for small farms. Miller eventually learned how to break down a carcass and cut beef himself, and when the company shut its doors in 1998, he found a job at Safeway Inc. As he worked his way up to managing the meat departments of various stores, he grew increasingly frustrated by the quality of the products and dismayed by the shipping and processing needed to bring steaks and sausages to supermarket shelves. “I got fed up with the corporate world and the direction of the meat industry,” Miller says.

For several years he moonlighted for his old boss, Steve Crossley, processing deer, elk, and antelope during hunting season. So when he approached Crossley in 2011 asking whether he could reopen the Meating Place, Miller got his blessing in exchange for free meat for life (a bargain because Crossley tends to eat his own wild game). Miller had saved up about $20,000, and before long he’d rented the meat department of an old supermarket a few miles from the original shop and opened a small meat-processing service, mostly for beef, hogs, and wild game.

“My long-term vision was fuzzy,” Miller says. “But I had an intuition there’d be interest and business would take off.”