Porter Road goes national with shipping business

For years, James Peisker and Chris Carter couldn’t regularly share their high-quality cuts of meat with friends and family who live outside Tennessee.

Until now.

The whole animal butchery that opened on Gallatin Avenue in 2011 is scaling nationally with their new venture capital-backed shipping business at PorterRoad.com to deliver pasture-raised meats in biodegradable packaging to consumers across the U.S.

“This move is helping us grow larger than we could imagine of one little brick-and-mortar shop in Nashville,” Carter said.

You can browse by meat type on the user-friendly website, but you can also search by cooking time and the type of cooking gear you want to use, such as a crock pot, grill or oven. Each cut has a description of the meat and detailed cooking notes.

Porter Road’s shipping department is operated out of Peisker and Carter’s Princeton, Ky. facility where they process and hand-cut beef, pork, lamb and chicken. The animals are pasture-raised with no antibiotics or hormones, and fed vegetarian, non-GMO feed.

All Porter Road beef is dry-aged a minimum of 14 days.

“The animal walks in one door and it goes out a box to your front door from another. It’s all happening in one spot,” Peisker said.

This move is significant for Peisker and Carter, who met in 2010 working in the kitchen of a downtown Nashville restaurant. Together they started their own catering business and quickly realized how hard it was to get quality, local meat. They launched Porter Road Butcher to meet that need in the marketplace.

Their goal with taking the business online is to make quality meat more accessible.

“We’re seeing some pretty interesting things emerge just from customers saying they haven’t been able to access this type of product since their local butcher shop closed 10, 15, 20 years ago,” said Ryan McIntyre, general manager of Porter Road’s online shop.

Carter said there's a benefit even for Nashville consumers, especially for those lamenting the loss of Porter Road Butcher’s west side location in fall 2016. Carter said he frequently runs into people on the west side who tell him they can’t visit the East Nashville store as often as they’d like to.

“(Now) those local customers in Nashville, they’re placing an order at one o’clock in the afternoon and receiving it 24 hours later,” Carter said.

Porter Road is offering free two-day shipping on orders over $100. Shipping prices for orders under $100 vary depending on location and whether a customer selects one- or two-day shipping. All orders are shipped within two days.

Reach Lizzy Alfs at lalfs@tennessean.com or 615-726-5948 and on Twitter @lizzyalfs.