Pasture To Plate

I’ve finally found a place that I can ethically buy meat from! After years of looking I appreciate the the thoroughness and pride that the business obviously has.
Very clean (especially for a butcher). Super friendly staff that explained their business model. Great selection, fresh, and while prices are higher than you would find at a normal grocer the difference is absolutely justified by «certified organic» process that is utilized.

In an effort to improve the quality of meat I’m consuming I decided to investigate the world of organic meats. I consume a whole lot of red meat and I figured this is a good place to start. Healthy, happy animals should lead to a healthy and happier me. My first foray into organic meats brought me to Pasture to Plate. They’ve got a great location on the drive and staff were always friendly. They were quick to answer any question I had although I am always there on slower hours.
I haven’t tried their more expensive cuts but their stew meats are great albeit on the pricier side. They’ve always came out incredibly tender. But that does lead me to my biggest qualm. price. When you’re forking out as much on beef bones as you are on the meat itself, you know there’s a problem. Looking at the other cuts, I just couldn’t bring myself to fork out that much when you can get more elsewhere. The cost to benefit ratio just doesn’t work out.
All that being said, I am a fan and if I could afford it, I’d definitely shop here more often.

Pasture to Plate helped us to be mindful of our protein meat intake, We just dialed in our food consumption at home and we decided to have meat twice a week, the rest is plant based diet. I love soups and this is my place to get my certified beef broth bones and some beef stews.
If you spend 200 you get 15% off. This will be our go to meat shops.
The staff know their cuts for sure. We love the staff — knowledgeable, laid back and super friendly.

My first visit to Pasture To Plate was better than I expected. The NY and Rib Eye was so incredibly tender and tasty. I’ll be back to try more items for sure.

This is my GO TO place for all my meats! Everything is grass fed and organic which is so hard to come by these days.
The price is very reasonable considering the high quality of the meats. Staff are really great and so helpful!
They always seem to have a great promo going on, last time I went I bought 2 pounds of grass fed ground beef and got the 3^rd for free!
Love this place! You can actually TASTE the difference!

Just eating their cook-​at-​home sausage roll. It’s AWESOME! I’m a sausage roll junkie and I have tried them all. These are easily some of the best I have ever had. Was a little sweet though, but still very very good! Tastes great with a side of mustard :)

These guys are friendly, helpful and are the only place I will buy meat. I love that they source their meat ethically and feel good about spending a bit more for top quality.

I shop here once in a blue moon when I want to treat myself to a really clean product, however their prices have gone up quite a bit since they first opened. I remember in the beginning I could walk in and just take what I needed from the freezer. Now it’s all behind the counter and twice the cost. I guess that’s gentrification for you.
I appreciate the organic quality, it’s just hard to justify some of the prices I’m seeing there. Even things like soup bones, which are normally throwaways, can cost you close to $ 30 if you buy a couple bags. I mean, honestly. When I was a kid the butcher used to give me those things for free or at very low cost.
The cuts of meat I bought there recently cost me an arm and a leg (no pun intended), and the quality wasn’t that much more than you’d find elsewhere. Yeah, organic… yada yada… there are other organic meat shops that don’t charge this much. Commercial Drive really has become commercial.

Most impressed with quality, selection, and service. I’ll be buying all my meats here now. Also easy to place an order a day prior for something popular eg chicken drumsticks so you won’t be disappointed as those go quickly.

I love this place! I am a great believer in ethical meat, so Pasture to Plate is perfect for me! The meat I’ve had is always great quality and the staff are always helpful and cheerful. It was really useful to have to difference between their bacon and conventional bacon explained to me (it’s nitrate free, so it’s not bright red!), and rest assured it tastes almost exactly the same.
I’ve had chicken, beef, and bacon from here and I’ve always had great experiences and really enjoyed the meat. Yes, it’s definitely pricey, but that’s to be expected for local, ethical, seasonal, organic product! Not somewhere I could afford every day, but luckily I don’t eat meat too often! The super convenient location is the final big bonus for me — there’s nothing like being able to do all your shopping within a couple of blocks and knowing you’re getting good stuff!

We loved our Pasture to Plate turkey!
The texture was just as I remember from my great-​grandparents’ farm, where they raised and butchered everything themselves.
I’ve only bought the best quality meats for that past 15 years, but this turkey was everything I could hope for.
If you’re used to the pasty-​textured poultry meat from larger commercial farms, where tricks are used to alter and disguise the flavour and texture of even organic birds, you will find these quite different. The meat was tender but firm and VERY tasty.
We loved it and all agreed we’ll make P2P our first choice for all meat from now on. Their company practices and efforts sit well with me, and I rarely feel anyone’s standards meet my own. (sorry to sound snobby, but my opinions are formed from strict European ethics)
I have two small quibbles:
I was told there would be no organs included in my turkey, but there was a bag inside te cavity with heart and neck — I think the staff should have been informed of that.
Also, I find the sausages a little too salty, (though I never add salt and avoid it like the plague, so it’s probably just me). In every other way, the sausages are absolutely delicious, but more than that, they have a healthy, clean feeling to them.
I sincerely wish all butchers had such exemplary practices. Please maintain them, P2P!

Nice concept, nice location, mediocre product, not overly helpful staff and product is way to inconsistent. Worth a look every now and then, definitely not the local butcher shop Commercial drive deserves, go next door to the daily catch and have some Oceanwise Seafood.

I have been repeatedly disappointed at Pasture to Plate.
I endeavour to shop local sourced, healthy food animals (i.e. grass fed beef). I love shopping on the Drive, living nearby, and tried Pasture to Plate over a several month period.
Their sausages were okay, but all the various cuts of beef were repeatedly disappointing (fatty, gristly, tough) — even those that «looked good». I did have a few cuts that were good, which is why I kept trying them. But it’s not worth playing Russian Beef Roulette.
Their stock is limited, which I understand being small and serving fresh. I’d be okay with that, but the quality of the cow… not worth going back, I’m afraid.
The staff are nice, and the shop clean. They do try, and they have a great idea, but fall short with their offerings.
So far nothing beats Windsor Quality Meats on Main St. for tasty, happy, healthy, red meat.

I go here several times weekly and am surprised to hear all the negative reviews. I do agree the bacon is often all fat though. That’s one downside. But everything else is delicious. Try the pork neck steaks. Good price and they’re impossible to mess up. So tasty, just don’t cook them all the way through.

really have to know what to buy here.
Awesome: brisket sandwich, split pea soup, mutton tenderloin (when they rarely have it), pork chops
Awful: all the beef i ever bought here — tough, expensive… we tried many times, tried better cuts, regretted buying every piece of beef. in addition, lamb rack was also tough… would have tried the lamb tenderloin (the mutton tenderloin was fantastic) but it was too expensive to risk being disappointed again.
so, try the pork! or the sandwiches. avoid the beef.

Great place. It’s one of the few spots you can get purely grassfed beef. Yes the cuts are fatty but the delicious golden butter (grass fed fat) is what you’re after. If you’re scared of fat go buy some tasteless chicken breast and convince yourself you’re being healthy.
Try some marrow bones, that’ll warm up your insides

When they have supplies its top grade meat products but they seem to always sellout especially the organic chicken… At least 5 times now… even by mid afternoon. Very very frustrating… One would think that if they keep selling out then get more stock make more money. So they tell me every time they only have one supplier, well tell the supplier to supply more… Nice staff, nice place. I suggest to call ahead of time and put our order on hold, or pick option B

Beef, oh the Great Canadian beef. To my understanding, as a cook, US and Canada carries the top 2 beef in the world. Scottish beef is always talked of, but never tried it and Wagyu is too expensive to have it in your daily cooking. Black Angus from US, which is slightly sweeter when compared to Canadian, and our AAA is so good, so good and so affordable in our standards, it is not funny. I am enjoying this wonder as much as I can.
The quality of ingredients makes difference when you cook. I grew up in Mediterranean, in my grandma’s kitchen, I strictly believe in buying the best ingredient to cook — that you can afford of course– and celebrate it for what it is. Some organic produce is fantastic, like carrots, the difference is usually night and day.
BUT, if you are asking $ 5 for couple mediocre tomatoes, just because they are organic, that I am not buying into. Everybody identifies great produce, really good things show themselves and gets your attention. Those are the things that you would like to cook with, not the description on the tags or the guilt traps with wondrous marketing slogans.
Does organic beef tastes better than your regular Canadian beef from Alberta? Nope, not really. Actually protein cookery and the flavor of it completely depends on the cook’s talent level. A well preparation and knowledge of protein is very important in kitchens to respect the actual animal’s sacrifice for your appetite. A living being is giving their life to feed you, to me it does not get more personal than that.
Now, my problem with this store is the price tag. I do not mind paying good price for really good ingredients, and I am sure they were very happy animals, the way they were raised, but you are asking $ 14 for 2 lbs of ground beef or $ 50 for a kilogram of a steak. I stopped by couple days ago, marbling and age lacks on the beef, at least the ones on the display that day. I call a friend over, let’s say 2X16 oz, on the bone, rib eye, I am in $ 50, no booze, no sides, no appy’s yet. That is more than an arm and a leg, plus costco’s steaks would beat yours any given day when you leave the marketing side out and put them on the platform for comparison for what beef is.
I am sorry boys and girls, but it doesn’t make sense… Not where we live, not the way we can get it.

If you want a guilt-​free conscience, but aren’t willing to sacrifice your meat-​hungry taste buds by going vegetarian, when you buy from Pasture to Plate, you can at least rest knowing that the meat you’re eating came from animals that led a good life.
Besides, happy animals taste better, right?
So, how do we know they’re happy? Cause it says so on their website! (
). No, but seriously though. It’s because of the way they’ve been treated. Take the chickens, for instance. As chicks, they’re fed certified organic feed, and aren’t subject to the vaccines or drugs that plague the young lives of conventionally raised chickens. As they grow older, they get moved to green pastures contained within poultry fences, which rotate every week so they always have access to fresh, green grass. And of course, they always have access to fresh, running water.
Not only are they treated well, they (the meat — the chicken — the pork — the beef — the lamb) all come from one farm: the Rafter 25 Ranch in Redstone, British Columbia. Not an easy feat if you ask me. But maybe this is the way farming is supposed to be (instead of the agro-​conglomerates that exist today).
So, given all these accolades, why only 4 stars? It’s because I’m not a big fan of their part-​diner, part-​butcher configuration. (Here’a partial photo as I forgot to include the tables and chairs on the left:
)
Pasture to Plate seems determined to complete that circle of bringing the meat from the pasture to your plate — literally. Patrons can buy fresh, raw meat displayed inside the case, and then sit down to a sandwich or a nice bowl of stew while waiting for their meat to be packaged up. I don’t know if they’ll cook up whatever you point to, like in a fish frying shop, but intuition tells me no. You can check them out yourself if you’re intrigued. Either way, I’ll probably return for some meat action and will do my best to ignore the diner section.

Here’s a novel concept: know where your meat comes from. Not just what part of the world, but the actual farm it was produced on. The sharing of this information seems to be normal in other areas of the world such as the UK and parts of Europe, where food labelling is generally more strict than in Canada. Pick up a package of pork tenderloin at Marks & Spencer’s and you’ll see a picture of the farmer who produced it. I noticed Superstore started to do this recently with their ‘Free From’ line of meats.
But I digress — Pasture to Plate is a new butcher shop that does exactly what their name says: it delivers free, grassfed organic meats from farms in the Chilcotin Valley to their store on the Drive. If you go to their website, you’ll see photos and information on the four producers along with proof of their organic certification. I love that.
When I visited them, they had a great selection of beef, lamb and pork, but not a lot of chicken or turkey. Apparently turkey is limited to the holidays. Their freezer is also stocked with items to save you another trip to the store.
Yes, it’s pricey (just over 1lb. of pork tenderloin was $ 24.83) but it was delicious and that’s the price that you pay for fresh, local and organic. I would suspect the prices would be similar at Whole Foods — haven’t bought meat from there in a long time to fairly compare.
The staff are friendly and knowledgeable, and let me know that since the meat was grass-​fed, it would cook more quickly. They have other cooking tips on their website. I’ll be back to try some other cuts!