Chico Locker Celebrates 60 Years in Business
Six Decades of Quality, Community, and Good Sausage…
David Dewey’s name hangs in the Cured Meat Hall of Fame, an honor the American Association of Meat Processors reserves for those who’ve spent decades making good sausage and are willing to teach others how to do the same.
Dewey has taught plenty — he still runs seminars for other processors. But ask him about the honor, and he steers the conversation back to the shop: Chico Locker & Sausage Co., the storefront his father bought in 1965, still smoking bacon and stuffing casings 60 years later, even as old competitors went self-service or closed.
Chico has grown up around that shop. When the Dewey family arrived, the town had roughly 18,000 people; it’s past 100,000 now, and much of the farmland that once surrounded it has become subdivisions. The outlying acres still raise livestock, and despite the massive growth, Dewey still believes that “Chico’s still a good town.”
Dewey was 12 when he moved with his father and sister to Chico. Working for family, he says, “can be challenging and sometimes difficult. But it also can be so rewarding at the same time. We were latchkey kids before anybody knew what latchkey kids were.”
He didn’t plan to stay in the meat trade. He already knew how to cut meat when a draft notice reached him in 1971, a few college units short of a deferment, so he enlisted in the Air Force instead. He worked in a commissary at Fairchild Air Force Base, one of three military butchers among 20 civilians. His stint in the Air Force gave him formal training in food safety, which he has put to good use ever since.
He worked for his father for six years after his discharge. Then, in 1981, his dad bought a market inside a grocery store and moved on — Dewey’s wife, Linda, went to work there — and Dewey took over the family shop. For a while, the business’ claim to fame was its custom slaughter operation: drive to a farm, butcher and quarter the animal, and bring it home for the freezer.
The turn came a year later at a meat processors’ convention in Sacramento. “Linda and I didn’t have two nickels to rub together,” Dewey says. They met people who’d built their shops into delis and sausage houses, and Dewey could see where the road led. He joined the California Association of Meat Processors and later the national American Association of Meat Processors, serving on both boards and eventually as national president in 1999. He toured plants at every convention. “These conventions were a real education for me. I would not have been as successful without these organizations.”
In 1985, he took over the rest of the building and opened a retail counter. He then bought a forced-air smokehouse to replace the gravity model he’d learned on. It cost more than he was comfortable spending, Dewey says, but now calls it “one of the best decisions I ever made.”
The shop carries more than 50 sausage varieties today, most of which were born the way Dewey describes: a seminar in Davis, a cured-meat show where someone’s Bavarian recipe won an award, an idea carried home and reworked to fit Chico. Asked which sausage is his most popular, Dewey laughs off the question. “God made blondes, redheads and brunettes,” he says. “Everybody’s taste is different.”
The jalapeno cheddar wurst outsells almost everything else. A Polish sausage and a linguica have each taken grand champion at national cured-meat shows — the kind of record that lands a processor in the Hall of Fame, where Dewey now belongs.
Some of the shop’s business still begins in the field. A two-ton Ford truck with a 12-foot refrigerated box serves as a mobile slaughter unit; Dewey’s crew dispatches the animal on a customer’s property and brings it back to age in the shop’s cooler. Hunters bring in deer, elk, bear and wild hogs, and Dewey coaches them on field care first. “It’s hard to take a spoiled piece of something and turn it into fine quality,” he says. Roughly nine in 10 are good enough for sausage, jerky or snack sticks. “If I can get your family to eat your game meat faster,” he says, “that means you get to go hunt and bring home another one.”
Service, Dewey says, has largely disappeared from big markets, where “you normally don’t get to talk to the butcher.” At his own counter, that conversation remains the point. “We feel customer interaction is important,” he says. “We are definitely more service-oriented than volume-oriented.”
Dewey’s father died in 1987 at 61. “I just wish he was here to see what his shop looks like now,” Dewey says. Dewey turns 75 in November. He and Linda, a Chico native, have been married for 52 years. The shop has outlasted the farmland around it and the competitors who went self-service. It’s still doing, 60 years later, what it did on day one: someone behind the counter, a knife in hand, telling you how to cook what you just bought. •
Chico Locker and Sausage Co.
196 E. 14th St., Chico • (530) 343-7370
www.chicolockersausage.com
Article Written by:
Al Olson loves culinary arts, adult beverages and hiking in the North State wilderness. You may find him soaking up the scenery at one of our area’s many state or national parks or sitting in a barstool sipping a cold locally brewed craft beer.
