The Meathouse broke ground on a new butcher shop in June 2022 and opened just one week shy of a year later. Located in Andover, South Dakota, we are a great stop along Highway 12.

Our brand new facility was custom built, allowing us to use special techniques, like tenderstretching, that we’ve learned over the years. Speaking of what we’ve learned over the years, let us tell you a bit more about how we got started.

It all started with Brad Morehouse. He began butchering in 1975 by learning from our Great Uncle Herman (Butch) Eklo. Our dad’s main job was working with 75 head of dairy cows, but he still found the time to butcher beef, hogs, and wild game.

While our dad butchered, friends and family would stop over and chat, and his butcher shop became a meeting place. This prompted the original name – the Meethouse.

Down the road, our dad married our mom Diann in 1981 and over the next 8 years, had the four of us: Justin, Brent, Jesse, and Desiree.

Our dad taught us boys how to butcher when we were just kids, the only requirement being you needed to be big enough to hold a knife. We have grown up as butchers and have learned so much along the way.

In 2004, the milk cows were sold and the “kids” went off to college. We eventually all trickled back and from 2005-2015, a feedlot was built. We tried many different methods of cow/calf and feedlot combinations. It eventually led to us breeding a Wagyu Bull to 23 cows in 2015.

We have since increased: 2016 we had 40 cows; 2017 we had 250 cows; and finally in 2018, we had increased to 500 head and butchered our first home-raised American Wagyu. After that, more and more family members were wanting our Wagyu meat.

A couple of years later in 2020, we had local ranchers that were breeding their cows to Wagyu bulls. They would then sell calves directly to us. During this year, we also saw an increased demand for our Wagyu meat, prompting us to have other butcher shops in South Dakota process the animals. This is where the idea started of building our own butcher facility – The Meathouse.

Later on that year, a hunter from Illinois had stopped in who turned out to be a retired USDA inspector. After talking with him, we just felt this was a sign to keep going, so we pushed on.

We worked with Huff Construction to design our building and facility and fast forward to today, we are up and running and truly excited to see where this next step will take us.

While we are extremely proud to have a brand-new USDA-inspected facility, we are also proud to see how far our family has come through the years. Our parents are now grandparents to a total of 14 grandkids (11 grandsons and 3 granddaughters). This is a family business and we value that – not only in how we treat our experienced team but in the fact that we want to always provide the best-tasting meat you can serve to your own family.