10 Below with Austin Collins

While cryotherapy is rising in popularity, I think Austin Collins prefers packing the orders in the freezer as quickly as humanly possible and getting the heck out of there - no therapy necessary. Did I lose you at cryotherapy? Well, for those of you who don’t know, cryotherapy also known as cold therapy is the general use of low temperatures in medical therapy. Here at Grateful Graze we brave the negative 10 degree and below temperatures not as a form of therapy but rather as a means to provide our customers with quality meats that must be kept frozen at an unfortunate 10 degrees or below. But hey it is okay because we love to hear that our customers are able to enjoy their meat since we are willing to sacrifice a little bit of sunshine and warm breezes for a couple hours in the freezer!

Austin Collins, Monte, and myself have been graced with this job of packing orders in the freezer, but we often rely on Austin to get the job done. When he is not busy building fences, moving cattle, or collecting eggs, you can find him in the freezer packing orders, specifically home delivery and UPS 1 Day Shipping orders. Home delivery orders are great for customers who simply do not have time to stop at the Freight House Farmers Market or those who cannot go out for various other reasons.

Austin packs both home delivery and UPS 1 Day Shipping orders on Tuesday, so they will be ready for delivery on Wednesday. Additionally he washes eggs and puts dates on them, so they will also be ready for our home delivery customers. As you can tell, this job requires an extreme amount of organization and time management! No worries, Austin is great at organizing and double checking to ensure your order is correct! The hardest part about the job, besides having to brave the 10 below temperatures, is you never know how long it will take. Some days we will have 30 orders to pack while other days we may only have seven, but Austin does a great job getting them ready to go no matter how many!

Watch the two videos below to get an inside look of our freezer and where your grass finished and pastured meat is stored! Keep watching to see Austin Collin's office and how he packs the orders. He also gives his opinion on the benefits of home delivery and why you should take advantage of it now!

I was lucky enough to get to ride along with Austin in the blue jeep on one of his Wednesday trips and meet some of our awesome customers while he was delivering orders to our customers’ homes. Packing orders in freezing temperatures means so much more now that I can put faces to orders, and of course I enjoyed talking to Austin for the entire 5 hour trip! From Kewanee, IL to Davenport, IA, we got to visit many different places all while providing our customers with quality (and of course very frozen) meats!