Most retailers make shopping as convenient as possible, with evening and weekend hours and e-commerce options. This shop doesn’t: It’s open only three hours a week, Wednesdays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., and there’s no online interface.
But that seems to be working out just fine—despite the tight midday hours, it’s usually bustling, perhaps because it’s stocked with rare products you won’t find anywhere else in the world. The customer base cuts across demographics, from Zoomers to Boomers.
What is this mysterious place? An exclusive boutique behind an unmarked door in the North Loop? Something related to the latest viral trend at the Mall of America? Nope. It’s the University of Minnesota’s Meat and Dairy Salesroom.
Although it may fly under the radar, the salesroom isn’t hard to find—sandwich boards helpfully point the way to the unassuming entrance on the main floor of the Andrew Boss Lab of Meat Science at the U’s St. Paul campus, and once inside, down a hallway. The salesroom is a narrow, utilitarian space with bright fluorescent lights, lined with chest freezers and refrigerator cases emblazoned with "Goldy's Smoke House." Two students at a folding table near the doorway serve as cashiers. The products are neatly arranged: packages of meat snack sticks, pints of ice cream and frozen yogurt, shrink-wrapped blocks of cheese, cuts of beef, whole chickens, and ready-to-heat items like meat loaves, marinated chicken wings, burger patties, and brats.
The biggest difference between the Meat and Dairy Salesroom and your typical grocery store is that all of the products—from the dulce de leche ice cream to the Swedish potato sausage—are produced hyperlocally on campus. Meat products come from the Meat Lab, dairy items are made at the Joseph J. Warthesen Food Processing Center (a.k.a. the Pilot Plant), and the honey is from the Bee Lab. The maple syrup logs the most food miles, arriving all the way from Chaska at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.
The university produces all of this food primarily for educational purposes. For example, in the Meat Lab, students harvest the animals (which are brought into the Meat Lab live), cut the fresh meat, and then complete any required further processing, such as making sausage, bacon, and ham with original recipes developed at the Meat Lab.
“We also render fat, so we sell beef tallow and pork lard, since those are becoming a lot more popular choices as cooking oils,” says Meat Lab supervisor Jordan McCallum, who also oversees the meat half of the salesroom. “We have also done some soap products from the pork lard and have done some tallow lotion. We don't always have that kind of stuff in the store, but we like to try to make some of those byproducts when we can.”
Most of these students are animal science majors who go on to work in the agriculture industry in meat processing plants, feed lots, and food production facilities. Similarly, students at the Pilot Plant may be working toward degrees in food science, with an eye toward the dairy industry. (One notable alum is Alise Sjostrom, who went on to found national award-winning Redhead Creamery on her family’s farm in Brooten, Minnesota.) The salesroom helps ensure that meat and dairy products made during class don’t go to waste, and proceeds help maintain the production facilities. The salesroom supports the research mission of the University of Minnesota by providing a market for animals harvested for research purposes, typically nutrition studies.
“It's going to be the same type of meat that you'd see at the grocery store, we’re not doing anything crazy,” McCallum explains. “We're just looking at how the animals are fed and how that can impact overall flavor, juiciness, texture, things like that, of the meat product.”
There’s also culinary experimentation going on with the flavors available in the salesroom.
“I try to get the students involved in making different varieties,” McCallum says. “We did a student competition where they got to develop their own bratwurst flavors. We had our department vote on which ones they liked the best—so if you ever see our pickle jack bratwurst, that was one of the ones that won, it’s dill pickles and pepper jack cheese. And then the other one is a barbecue bacon cheeseburger brat.”
The salesroom is the only place in the world where you can find Nuworld cheese, which is made with a strain of white mold that tastes like Stilton and Roquefort but lacks the distinctive blue coloration. That makes Nuworld especially suited to applications where it’s used as an ingredient, like the Nuworld spread available in the salesroom. Mixing a blue cheese into a dip would result in an unappetizing gray color, while Nuworld provides all the flavor of a blue with an appealing snow-white hue. (As much as I enjoyed my tub of Nuworld spread, it’s a bit jarring when something that looks like cream cheese tastes so pungent.)
There are also some unique options in the ice cream lineup, including Minnesota Sundae, which pairs a honey base with sunflower seeds; Gopher Gold, which combines a French vanilla base and a raspberry chocolate ripple; and Bear-chelor’s Degree, a tropical fruit flavored ice cream with gummy bears. Like all of the salesroom’s products, the specific selection of ice cream and frozen yogurt varies week by week (pints are $7.50, a recent increase due to the cost of ingredients), which adds an element of thrift store-style discovery—and it’s an incentive to become a regular customer.
According to McCallum, the salesroom’s most-purchased meat items are bratwurst and snack sticks. Her personal go-tos are steaks, coffee ice cream, Tuscan brats made with mozzarella cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, and hot Hawaiian-style snack sticks flavored with pineapple and ghost pepper cheese. Besides the aforementioned Nuworld spread, I grabbed blocks of havarti and cheddar to make a fancy mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner with my in-laws. (It was a huge hit; here’s the recipe.)
And everything is priced reasonably. You can pick up a pound of hot Italian meatballs for $5.99, or a package of four jalapeño pepperjack hamburger patties for around $9, though larger prime cuts of beef will set you back substantially more.
During my visit to the salesroom, I observed a wide range of customers: students grabbing snack sticks, a badge-wearing university employee buying a roast, and a 40-something couple stocking up on ice cream. McCallum confirmed the salesroom’s broad appeal: “We have some students, staff, and faculty members that shop at our store quite frequently, but we also have a lot of regulars that either live in the neighborhoods around campus or even drive specifically to come to our store.”
She estimates that the salesroom sees 150 customers on a typical Wednesday, an impressive number to squeeze in during a three-hour window. For folks who can’t make it in on Wednesday, there’s a curbside pickup option for meat products on Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
McCallum notes that customers tend to be protective of the salesroom’s low-key vibe.
“When we get media interviews or things that make us more public, sometimes the regulars are like, ‘Don't tell everyone our secret!”” she laughs. “But I do wish there was more knowledge that we exist and the background behind what we're doing. It’s not just a meat and dairy store, it's the education piece behind it.”
Meat and Dairy Salesroom at the University of Minnesota
Address: 1354 Eckles Ave., St. Paul
Hours: 2-5 p.m. Wednesdays
