Three Generations Of Butchers Keep Nauset Farms A Cut Above

ORLEANS – Steaks. Ground beef. Homemade pork and chicken sausages. You name it, odds are Nauset Farms has it.

The meat department at Nauset has historically been one of the store’s biggest draws, but not just because of the product. For many, it’s also the staffers that have been dishing out the choice cuts for years.

The store’s three-man butcher team of Rick Backus, Jim Peters and Shawn Baker collectively have 124 years of experience cutting meat between them, most of them on the Lower Cape.

“We all get along well,” said Backus, a Harwich resident who grew up in Orleans and has been a butcher in town for 52 years, including the last 20 at Nauset Farms.

Backus, who started working as a butcher in 1972 after a short stint at Cape Cod Community College, has long built a reputation locally as a meat expert. He started working in grocery stores when he was 15, and over the years has worked at the former Ellis’ Market (now Friends’ Marketplace) and the East Orleans Deli and Butcher Shop. He also ran his own shop for 14 years before coming to Nauset Farms.

With that, he’s also cultivated a dedicated clientele of shoppers who come in specifically to see him.

“He’s Rick the Butcher,” said the store’s owner, Peter Gori.

“If you’ve been in a town for 70 years, you’re going to know a lot of people,” Backus said. “And when you work in a small store, you have that relationship with the customers.”

Peters, who has been cutting meat since 1965, is similarly well known by the store’s shoppers. Like Backus, he also owned his own shop for 15 years in Natick before selling it in 2002. He and his wife moved to Yarmouth Port in 2006, and he started working part time at Nauset the following year.

“After 10 months, I told my wife ‘I need to get a job,’” he said. “The first thing I saw in the paper was a part-time job. I’ve been here ever since.”

A Brewster resident, Baker started out as a 16-year-old working the deli counter at Ferretti’s Market. Eventually he was offered the opportunity to learn how to cut meat, and he’s “been with it ever since.”

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do anyways, so it made it kind of easier,” he said. “You know, it’s a trade you can do anywhere and go anywhere with and always find a job.”

The job last year brought him to Nauset Farms, where he’s provided some much needed balance and assistance to the meat department. For many years, Backus and Peters manned the department themselves, sharing the work of cutting, receiving deliveries and helping customers. It was a lot of work, they recalled, especially during the always busy holidays and summer season. But when the COVID-19 pandemic came, exhaustion started to set in.

“During COVID it was wicked,” Peters said. “With just two guys here, we were working day and night.”

“Now that Shawn’s here, I don’t have to come in on a day off and fill the case,” added Backus. “Jim can’t be here seven days. When it was just two people, there were days when we were hurting for hands.”

At 32, Baker is much younger than his colleagues. But you can’t put an age on experience, and Backus and Peters say that he’s been a welcome addition.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Backus said. “He knows how to cut meat, but he’s nice enough to ask ‘This is how I do it, do you do it different? Do you want me to change anything?’ But he cuts and fills the case and does a good job.”

“The thing is every single butcher does something different,” Baker said. “We’re all trained differently and learned from different people.”

But beyond their collective experience, it’s the trio’s focus on customer service that continues to make the meat department at Nauset Farms such a draw. Over time, they come to remember people’s orders, even if they can’t always keep track of their names. And just when they think they have someone’s order dialed in, inevitably someone will switch things up.

But for Backus, that interplay with the customers is what keeps the job fun.

“I like people,” he said plainly. “I like keeping them happy.”

The butchers’ reputation at Nauset is such that Gori, who bought the store in 2023, said he might have reconsidered buying it if for some reason Backus had decided to retire.

“It’s important to me that they feel attached to the store,” Gori said of the store’s butchers. He called the meat department the store’s “economic underpinning” and the department that establishes the store’s “service baseline.”

Baker’s addition to the store’s roster gives Gori hope that future generations of butchers might have a place at his store. He said he’d like to work with Upper Cape Tech and other high schools to help train and mentor students interested in pursuing a career in the trade.

“Because you will learn something from all three of them,” he said. “It’s a hard business, but it’s like any trade. Who are the best lifelong [residents] and who can afford to live in this housing situation? It’s skilled craftsmen.”

And according to Peters, it’s worthwhile work, even after almost six decades.

“Let me tell ya, as long as I’ve been cutting meat, each year I still learn more things,” he said. “You’re always learning something every year.”

Email Ryan Bray at ryan@capecodchronicle.com