What Makes The Meat House a Home

in Avon might have been closed Halloween weekend, but staff was still able to get food to some of their customers.

General Store Manager Matt Cormier is making personal trips to at least five of his customers’ homes during the power outage to deliver food. That includes bread from Collinsville Baking Co., lettuce, cucumbers, mushrooms, pickles, squash, tomatoes, celery, sausages, hot dogs, avocados, apples, ginger, lemons and limes.

“I’ve got 10 bags in the back of my car,” Cormier said Monday. “We’ve got a good core of regular customers. I’m actually dropping food at some of my regular customers’ house rather than throwing it away and they’re out of power, so when I called them, they were very appreciative.”

They donated what they could to food shelters, but the power outage affected what kind of food the shelters could take.

“With no power, we called a lot of the local shelters,” Cormier said “We were able to donate some chicken. We were able to donate a lot of bread to local food shelters. A lot of them wouldn’t take anything else because they couldn’t cook it, couldn’t store it.”

A lot of meat, cheese and other perishables still had to be thrown out, Cormier said.

“Something like this is devastating for us to take,” Cormier said of the small meat store owned by the Gallivan family. “The meat, we really had to act fast,”

The Meat House was able to preserve a good portion of their meat, however, by storing it at Tulmeadow Farms in West Simsbury in a generator-run cooler.

“We had six or seven cars immediately loading up anything that we could save that is perishable to transport over there,” Cormier said. “We’re very grateful.”

Staff was working on Halloween to clean and get everything ready for when the power came back on. Route 44 regained power Monday evening.

“Once the power comes back on, we’re going to have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars of meat delivered to get the store going again,” Cormier said Monday. “We lost meat, deli, cheese and produce. We lost a lot of meat.”