Saturday morning amid the din of market noise, butcher Gregory Forde takes another customer’s meat order and turns to the saw to make the desired cut of meat, as several other customers watch and patiently wait their turn.
The meat stall with the imposing sign “G. Forde and Children” appears to draw the most customers in this section of the Cheapside Market, and one only has to stand and observe to discover why. This 43-year-old butcher is affable, accommodating, and clearly a master of his craft.
Similarly, Forde’s daughter, 21-year-old Sabrina, is skilfully carving a meat order. Clearly, she has taken her father’s lessons well.
Butchering as an art and a business is a tradition in this family.
“My father was a butcher, and I used to spend a lot of time around him and watch him. My uncle was a butcher and I had three brothers who also became butchers,” Forde told the Weekend Nation while working in his well appointed slaughterhouse at Locust Hall, St George, on a Tuesday, the day he slaughters livestock for market every week.
His is an engaging story of enterprise that has lured his young daughter away from the hospitality industry to butchering, an unusual field for a woman. It is also already attracting his 15-year-old son, a secondary school student.
“In a sense, I always knew I wanted to be a butcher because it was a comfortable living,” said Forde, who left school and began working at a hardware store before deciding to get involved in the slaughtering part of the business.
Forde, who began selling meat from his Grazettes, St Michael home, said: “Before I really got into the farming, I used to buy, but then I decided it was best to raise my own animals, and slaughter.” With money saved from the business, the enterprising Forde purchased the quarter of an acre property at Locust Hall and started his own pig farm.
He got a further boost when his father Simeon Forde retired and turned over the Fairchild Street Market stall to him.
This butcher has now been in the business for more than 20 years, rearing mainly pigs, along with a few cows and goats.
Closure of the slaughterhouse at the Barbados Marketing Corporation, which saw him having to meet an annual bill of about $40 000, forced him to build his own.
It is an impressive facility, through which the Weekend Nation team was conducted, starting with a look at pigs’ spending the stipulated 24-hour resting period in the holding pen before being slaughtered, through the stunning area, the scalding tank, the machine where hair is removed, to the gutting of the pig, and splitting of the carcass, washing and trimming.
Ministry of Health quality control officer Melanese Holder, who arrived to do the routine inspection of the carcasses and organs dangling from large meat hooks, remarked during the inspection: “This is one place where I find that the animals always seem to be raised well.”
From childhood, Forde’s son Kadeem could always be found at his father’s feet around the farm. Today Kadeem competently steps into his father’s shoes when necessary: “I can leave him to do anything. When I come back, it is well done and no questions asked. Anything he cannot handle he will call me or he will call his sister,” said Forde.
However, Forde does not yet want his teenage son involved in the slaughterhouse.
In the case of his daughter Sabrina, he remarked: “I let her choose what she wanted to do. She went on her own, doing what she wanted, and when she realised it was not working out, she came back and said ‘Dad, I want to work with you’.
“From there I put things in place and extended the business to accommodate her. I then got the stall that was my father’s stall which he handed down to me, and I gave it to her and got another one for myself in the Cheapside Market.”
Forde is looking down the road in anticipation that his son might fully follow in his footsteps and is prepared to do the same for Kadeem.
Management is key for this businessman and an aspect of the operation which he stresses to his children, telling them: “You have to be very serious where money is concerned in business.”
His teaching has been effective, as evidenced by Sabrina’s capable management of the paperwork and the financial side of the business.
Forde said with a hint of satisfaction: “I don’t have any problem with my customers paying. If they buy meat from me all the years, the day they tell me they want meat and they don’t have money I let them have it.”
Those customers have grown used to a level of service in which their demands are met. “If I cut a piece of meat and the customer does not like it, I put it back and cut again. The customer must be satisfied.”
With his children’s interest, Forde expressed confidence in the future of G. Forde and Children, remarking: “This business will hold its own.”
