Organic Butcher Post-anniversary Reflection

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November 18, 2025

The owner of The Organic Butcher, Don Roden, worked in sales and marketing for an Internet company in Southern California in 2002.

On the heels of his celebrating 20 years in business as the organic butcher, I wondered how in the world he ended up in Northern Virginia as a butcher. So I had a conversation with him.

“Around the time when the tech bubble burst, everyone was losing their jobs and moving into different fields, I returned to Northern Virginia, where I’m from. It was a pivotal time in my life." Said Don.

Around this time, he began thinking more about his health, including what he ate. Don researched and learned how to source healthful foods and prepare meals at home. He developed a passion for finding a way to share what he learned, both the food and the know-how he’d acquired. That was when he first got the idea of becoming a butcher.

“Up until that time, I never thought I’d ever be a butcher, or wanted to be a butcher. Many people assume that butchery was in my family. I get that question a lot: whether my father or grandfather, or even grandmother was a butcher. They’re always a bit surprised to find that’s not the case.”

Applying his business experience at the beginning of this journey, Don felt he could focus his enthusiasm on his vision of opening many stores, making it profitable to connect people with real food. But after opening the first location in McLean, that vision gave way to maintaining profitability in a small-scale model.

Starting a business was challenging enough. He didn’t want to spread himself too thin.

“The last thing I wanted to do was over-extend & not offer the highest level of service & product that we can. I didn’t want to just open more shops to make more money. I wanted us to be the best butcher shop we could be and offer the best service. That’s why it took 17 years to decide to open a second one.”

When the first Organic Butcher opened, they processed whole animals rather than buying pre-selected cuts. This created a challenge because each animal only provides a small amount of some highly popular cuts. Once those few cuts were sold, the shop still had to find a use for less-popular parts of the animal.

(A great example of this is the tenderloin. Each cow has only two tenderloins, which means only a few pounds of this prized, tender meat come from an entire animal. Since demand is much higher than the supply one animal can provide, it becomes difficult for whole-animal butchers to keep it in stock while still selling the rest of the cuts.)

“There are a couple skirt steaks and a couple hanger steaks, you only get so many ribeyes, and then hundreds of pounds of ground beef.”

A good butcher finds a balance of offerings: everyday foods along with higher-priced selections, educating customers about what’s available and when. Don has become an expert at educating his patrons and empowering them to utilize and be nourished from the whole animal.

When asked to describe a perfect day at the shop, Don says, “It all starts in the morning. The cases are full, the smoker is fired up, the music is on. You open up your doors, and your customers are smiling, your staff is laughing. There’s a certain amount of organized chaos, but it feels good. It feels like home. You just know when it’s going to be a good day; you can feel it. The energy is electric.”

Bring your own good vibe to Organic Butcher at 6712 Old Dominion Drive in McLean; or the second location at 7925 Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda.

You will be deeply nourished.

Susan

All Related

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year--that's a lot of stuff going on kind of lumped together. Which brings me to my thought this month: it's all related. Perhaps the signature difference between Polyface and current mainline food thinking is integration versus segregation. I could use numerous words to describe this basic concept, like parts versus wholes, but I think these two are as good as any. Conventional industrial food systems break things apart. We see it on farms that grow only one or two things, without regard for the greater inter-relatedness of ecology, all the way up to packaged and processed food. Modern processed foods don't use whole ingredients; they use pieces of things. They strip out the germ of the wheat, for example. They refine things to the point that the food bears no resemblance to its natural state. Then they put all these pieces together and call it food. But these pieces came from widely divergent places, and the beautiful unprocessed original no longer exists. When Dad and I were brainstorming what to call this farm venture that would eventually become Polyface, Dad's assumption was that we'd call it Salatin Inc.--you know, like Ford Motor Company or Chrysler (named for Walter P. Chrysler, the founder). I was adamant that it NOT be our family name for two reasons. First, I suggested there may be a day when a Salatin isn't at the helm. Secondly, I wanted the name to recognize integrated thinking. I came up with the name "Interface Inc." to recognize the three great environments: water, land, and forest. For 20 years, during what I call our experimental homesteading days, we'd been planting trees, fencing out riparian zones, fencing out the forest to protect it from cows, and developing a landscape plan with these various zones in mind. The State Corporation Commission rejected the name because, unbeknownst to us, Virginia already had an "Interface Inc." It was a labor arbitration company to work out disagreements between labor and management. I was milking the cow when Dad told me the bad news, and I spontaneously blurted: "If we can't be Interface, let's be Polyface--the farm of many faces." Dad laughed, but we both liked the idea, and it stuck and was approved. The point here is that from the outset, all our thinking was about how to leverage the various assets of the diversified ecosystem and then harness the distinctives of the various animals. As a result, we looked at symbiotic natural patterns and have done our best to duplicate them. The Eggmobile follows the cows so the chickens can scratch through cow pies. We use pigs to aerate compost. Our small flock of sheep is like a glorified weed eater, cleaning up fence lines and around farm buildings to reduce mowing. The animals move through the pastures, paddock to paddock; they don't stay in the same place. Illustrative of "conventional-think", Virginia Tech veterinary professors who judged my son Daniel's 4-H talk titled "Symbiosis and Synergy in the Racken (Rabbit-Chicken) House" at the state contest nearly 30 years ago couldn't restrain their skepticism. "Aren't you concerned about diseases with two species that close to each other?" I was never so proud. He was about 15 and, without batting an eye, looked those professors in the eye and replied: "We've learned that most pathogens don't cross-speciate." Folks, I had not prepped him for that question. When he responded like that, those three professors slapped their legs and laughed at the audacious notion. They had no further comments and immediately tried to recruit him to enroll at Virginia Tech and major in Veterinary Science. Instead, he stayed with me on the farm and scaled up these simple integrated relationships to the thousands of animals we have now--with virtually no vet bills. Meanwhile, conventional experts wring their hands over bird flu, screw worm, African swine fever, blackleg, and a host of maladies that attack places where an integrated approach toward biology is severely lacking. Pediatrician Dr. Sharon Goldfield, director of population health for the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Baby Food and Youth Obesity." She slammed "packaged baby and toddler foods" because they fail even rudimentary nutrition standards. Their surveys indicated that "80 percent of children are eating packaged toddler foods, many of which are ultra-processed, from an early age, with 43 percent of them eating these foods at least five days a week." Kids are eating out of boxes and slurping from concoctions created by a segregated mentality from field to stomach. This segregated thinking even permeates parental decision making, divorcing overall health from food and assuming whatever happens, pharmaceuticals can fix it. At Polyface, everything we do assumes that everything we do affects something else we do. It's that simple. Both land health and people health occur when we realize everything relates to everything. You can't just eat well and not exercise. You can't dismiss the value of sunlight on your skin; especially early morning sunlight. Hydration. Sleep. Stress. Forgiveness. Gratitude. It's all part of us. As we celebrate all these holiday times and imagine the relatedness of Thanksgiving with the Christmas story with the eagerness of a new year, imagine all the things going on in your life and how they work together. Or how if you pull them apart, things fray. Be assured that here at Polyface we're trying to integrate ecology, people, and economy in an overall symbiotic whole to deliver you the best food at a reasonable price. And we thank you for helping us build an integrated whole that respects earthworms all the way to our dinner plate and microbiome. We're not feeding you earthworms, but be assured they play an ongoing role in every bite you enjoy from Polyface. Thank you. Joel