walk away when your body has nothing left to give? 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
Thomson’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,” Chris says. Local business like Old Schoolhouse Brewery use Thomson’s walk-in cooler space to store barreled beer. Aside from restaurant clientele, Chris also processes the meat for deer hunters every fall. Without Thomson’s, it’s uncertain where the hunters would go. “There are guys that have been bringing deer here for the last 67 years” through several family generations, Chris says
Chris Thomson is familiar with the long history of what was once called Methow Valley Meats. Photo by Mandi Donohue
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 9 or 10 years old. We’d walk across and then hang out here. Some of the meat guys would kind of 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 and distributed to surrounding grocery stores in the area. It’s a business that has provided jobs for almost a century. “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 Thomsons’ purchase, there were many owners and a time when 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 its been that name for 100 years,” Chris says.
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 afterwards made her way north to Seattle. Chris came from the grocery scene in Seattle, working for Town & Country Foods and supplying 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
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