The Organic Butchery (Coombe Farm)

Subscription boxes are great for many reasons. They’re a way for people to get something quite niche that isn’t necessarily available in the shops delivered straight to their door. They can help geeks and nerds get hold of exclusive items or fashionistas find brands that others won’t have. Where they really come into their own, though, is when it comes to getting fresh, hand-picked food delivered straight to your door.

That’s where the Organic Butchery comes in. They are essentially, as the name suggests, a farm shop online. You can buy fresh meat, such as beef and lamb, delicious fish and even things to fill in your pantry. However, the most interesting thing is their selection of pre-picked boxes that are filled with fantastic produce with a lower price per kilo than they would otherwise have if purchased individually.

How Does It Work?

Subscription services all follow a similar pattern: You sign up to receive something on a regular basis and pay a fee for the pleasure. In the case of the Organic Butchery, the thing you’re signing up for is a pre-picked box of fantastic food. You can simply get a one-off box or else sign up for regularly deliveries of different items, the choice is entirely yours.

What Do You Get?

What do you want? There are different customisable boxes of organic food to suit pretty much every occasion. There are standard boxes available all year round, as well as seasonal boxes for special times of year like Christmas and Easter. There are boxes for steak lovers, options for students looking to eat a quick but nutritious meal, as well as boxes that contain enough for a family to enjoy a feast.

Each of the boxes are filled with corresponding goodies that you’d expect to find in them, such as sausages and burgers in the BBQ box. We’ll talk about specifics in the examples section but you might like to know that the Organic Butchery pride themselves on serving organic produce that is farmed in an ethical and sustainable manner. They raise their animals with great care for their well-being and welfare, so what arrives on your doorstep is as ethically sound as it’s possible to get.

The farm is even powered by solar energy where possible and the animals are allowed to graze freely. All of that may sound like funny information to put in the ‘What Do You Get?’ section, but it’s the major selling point of the Organic Butchery and it’s important to let you know what you’ll receive. You can buy meat and fish from supermarkets but here the way the meat and fish is dealt with and prepared is as important as the product itself.

Options

It wouldn’t be true to say that the options are endless, but they are close. The important thing to note is that you are buying boxes of meat and fish rather than full meals. That is to say, you don’t get vegetables with your selection. Perhaps you’ll be interested in the BBQ box, filled with meaty goodies for an afternoon in the garden on a sunny day? Maybe you’re the sort of person that likes to try something ‘unusual’? In that case, the Ofally Good Box will interest you as it contains the bits of the animal not typically eaten. There’s a fish box for those of you that love sea-based dinners, a box containing half a mutton and another with half a lamb inside. There are boxes filled solely with beef, too.

Examples

In the Steak Box you’ll find… well… steaks. There’s a sirloin, a minute steak, a flat iron, a ribeye and some stir-fry beefsteak strips. The BBQ Box has prime beef burgers, lamb burgers, chicken wings and two different types of sausage. The Student Taster Box is not dissimilar with the burgers and pork sausages remaining. There’s also meatballs, chicken supreme, steak mince and gammon.

The Ofally Good Box is particularly interesting. The farm employs a nose-to-tail system to make use of as much of the animal carcass as possible. That’s why this box contains the likes of pig heart, lamb kidneys, pork trotters, chicken giblets, marrowbones and lamb’s liver. If you’re more traditional in your eating habits, then the Family Feast Box might be for you. In there, you’ll find such treats as burgers, beef steak mince, meatballs and pork escalopes.