Farmingdale butcher beefs up its online offerings as it celebrates 75 years of cuts

Four million pounds of meat passed through a Main Street shop in Farmingdale last year. That was less than normal due to COVID-19, said Lee Seelig, president of Farmingdale Meat Market and Main Street Wholesale Meats.

Now in its 75th year, business is starting to get back to normal as pandemic restrictions recede and restaurant dining rooms are filling up again.

"The pandemic and everything has obviously been super challenging," Seelig said. As an essential business, they stayed open and became "more connected to the community."

"Just because we’ve been here for so long we had a continued pipeline of meat throughout the whole pandemic," he said.

Seelig said the pandemic forced them to change their business.

To counter the shrinking wholesale business to restaurants and country clubs, they began using their fleet of a dozen trucks to deliver online orders to doorsteps across Long Island.

"We can be your local butcher now with our new website," he said.

Outside of their 100-mile range, they even ship meat in freezer packs by FedEx, he said.

The business certainly has changed in the span of nearly a century and since the days when carcasses delivered by rail hung on hooks in the shop.

Julius Seelig, a German immigrant, opened the market in 1946, when it was a retail shop and didn’t face competition from large supermarkets. His son Kent, who took over the business and now runs it with his son Lee, started the wholesale side 35 years ago, and that became its main business.

A part of the business, years ago, was cutting up and packaging deer for hunters, but "those days are long gone," Lee Seelig said. Today, the shop can special-order venison from an overseas distributor, he said.

A few hooks remain on-site for special orders of whole animals, but today beef and other meats come in large cuts that can weigh up to 70 pounds before the butchers in Farmingdale make custom cuts.

At a time when large national companies such as Restaurant Depot are competing for the wholesale market, Seelig said they stand out by offering personalized service.

"We’re like a meat concierge," Seelig said. Restaurants can call him up and talk about the market and cuts and portion sizes. "The steaks you got from me are cut that morning for you and they come to your restaurant for service that night."

Jason Berman, manager of Piccolo Restaurant in Huntington, said they’ve been customers for a long time because of the consistent quality, service and competitive prices.

"We trust them with a key to our meat fridge," Berman said. "They know exactly how we like it. They cut the meats to what we have on our menu. If we need 9-ounce pieces, they butcher it for us."

Farmingdale Mayor Ralph Ekstrand, who runs a pharmacy four stores down, said he’s known all three generations of Seeligs, whose shop he called a village "mainstay" where butchers "custom-cut your meat" and still give children a free slice of bologna.