Our Story

We never planned to buy a butcher shop in our 20’s. It was always a dream for somewhere down the line, but life has a funny way of giving you opportunities when you least expect it.

I grew up in the West Wollongong area, not too far from where Cleaver & Co. is now. In fact, we actually used to buy meat from there when it was under a previous owner. 

After leaving school I quickly fell in love with butchery but came to resent the dodgy practises of other butchers and also the ambiguous answers I was told to give when asked about the origins of the meat. I didn’t want to sell endless amounts of factory farmed chicken breast. I didn’t want to sell cartons and cartons of feed lotted scotch fillet out of a plastic bag. I didn’t want to sell kilos of imported bacon from pigs grown in countries with worse factory farming records than Australia. I wanted to sell responsibly raised meat from New South Wales farmers, farmers I had met and talked to. I wanted to sell the whole animal, not just the parts people were conditioned to want, while disregarding the other bits as someone else’s problem. 

Cleaver & Co. in many ways is the result of my passion for exceptional produce and the natural world. What started out as a quest for health became a passion for food. This passion for food introduced me to exceptional produce. This produce began to teach me about agriculture- the good and the bad. I am still on a journey, but for now that journey is increasingly fuelling my passion for agriculture- the good kind. Agriculture that encapsulates animal welfare, works with nature and gives back to the land, rather than taking from it.

At its simplest form, I want Cleaver & Co. to be a vessel that showcases the country’s best producers and their produce.

Lachy Kerr