Ross’ Glenwood City Locker finally settles in their new home on First Street

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By Missy Klatt

GLENWOOD CITY — With numerous construction delays it was a long time coming but, Ross’ Glenwood City Locker is finally in their new home just down the street at 240 First St., the corner of 1st and Maple Streets, in Glenwood City. Jim Ross gets very emotional when he talks about the start of business at their new location. It was 34 years ago to the day, March 15, 1989, that they had purchased and began processing at the former location, and they began processing at their new location on March 15, 2023. It’s obvious that Jim takes a tremendous amount of pride in what he does.

Jim and Terri, his wife, first started Ross’ Glenwood City Locker on March 15, 1989, taking over from the Hills who had previously owned the locker business. For the past 34 years farmers and hunters have been able to bring their animals to Ross’ for all their butchering needs.

Terri had worked alongside Jim until it got to the point where they needed health insurance and couldn’t afford to buy it themselves. It was then that Terri began to work outside the locker plants at various jobs with the last twenty years working for the post office. 

Jim and Terri have three children, Rhonda, Rachel, and Richard. When Richard decided that he wanted to stay and work for the locker fulltime, it seemed like a good time to expand and build a new building. That and the fact that they just needed more space and it just wasn’t cost effective to fix the old building, according to a few experts that Jim talked to.

The old building which housed the locker was originally built in the 1940s and was seeing signs of wear and tear due to the moisture from the freezers and coolers. Jim would like to sell the building but is not sure yet, if and when that will happen.

While the service and quality of the locker plant remain the same, they will now be able to offer more services to the community. Probably the most obvious change is now there is a walk-in retail trade area. While you could orders meats in the past it will now be convenient for consumers just to stop in and buy fresh frozen cuts of beef, pork, and chicken. As things progress they will also offer a variety of smoked meats and sausages and the bratwurst that they’ve always had.

The building has its own smokehouse room now, whereas before they used to have to send meats out to be smoked. “Number one we’re trying to get acquainted with the building.” comments Jim. They are still getting used to the flow of their processing area while maintaining meat safety and

making sure that the coolers and freezers are working properly. Processing fresh meat for people has been the main staple of the business for all these years so they want to make sure that part of the business is running smoothly before they start to really expand into all the facets that the new building will allow.

Besides the growing pains of expansion and the whole building process Jim states that they also have some new equipment that they need to learn how to use. That includes a new vacuum stuffer for ground meat and a new clip machine that ties off the packages. These will both make the process more automated and save them time in processing. At the time of this interview they had only been using this new equipment for less than a week but Jim noted that so far it had been going pretty well.

Currently the hours of operation will remain the same for customers at 8-5, Monday thru Friday and 8-12 on Saturdays. However, Jim and his crew start their day even earlier with Jim starting his day around 5:00 a.m. each morning.

With expansion also comes the need for more workers. Jim will be adding to his work force as soon as possible. Eventually he hopes to be able to have someone full time just to run the retail side of the business and answer phones.

Something interesting that Jim explained was “All though there is a lot of processing plants right in this area, there are not a lot of processing plants throughout the state and country. There are some people that travel miles and miles to get meat processed.” Ross’ have clients from all over St. Croix, Dunn, Polk, and Pierce counties. But, they are selling meat to people all over including Alaska, New Jersey, Illinois, Iowa, and the Dakotas. “As small as we are the web grows just like the internet or Facebook. It spreads out more and more.”

Besides being able to buy meat Ross’ currently has some meat rubs for sale. In the future the hope is to possibly add some honey or syrup or other foodie items produced by local people.

Ross’ still plan to help out the community at Rustic Lore and fair time and they hope that they will be able to also help with some catering needs in the form of roasters of meat. Right now they are just trying to get used to the new building and get all the “bugs” worked out.

Jim hopes that everyone will be patient until they build up their varieties of sausages and other products. Right now in the retail area they have fresh frozen cuts of steak, roasts, pork chops, bacon, hamburger and even some cod for the Lenten season. 

Richard who was busy elsewhere in the plant did stop in and share his advice, “Come in and check it out.”