CUSTOMER STORIES
Olympia Provisions -Not your average meats.
Olympia Provisions creates cured meat with deep, nuanced flavors and exquisite textures. Apprenticing with European masters, salumist and co-owner Elias Cairo learned to age meats the old way: naturally and slowly. At Olympia, they do things the slow way because it's the right way. Saveur calls the result "some of the finest charcuterie we've tasted."
Olympia uses traditional techniques and modern ideas to make cured meats that taste "as good as they possibly can." And if a product isn't right, it doesn't get shipped.
THE RIGHT RESULTS EVERY SINGLE TIME
With 65 different products sold from California to New York and all points in between, Olympia needs a way to ensure that every customer gets the same product that tastes the same way every time.
"Documentation is not just for safety, but for quality. It means we can say, 'If we do this and this, here's the result we get every single time.' We can make it exactly the way we want it."
HANDMADE WITH DOCUMENTED PRECISION
As Oregon's first USDA-approved salumeria, Olympia is required to keep two years' worth of records. SKALA helps "because we can instantly pull up any of the QA or QC specs on one of the products and we know exactly who monitored it, what parameters it met or didn't meet, and what corrective actions were taken. The auditor doesn't always want to see the stuff that went well, they want to see what we do when something doesn't go exactly as planned."
Salumist Elias Cairo, grew up first generation Greek-American with a father who made charcuterie at home. Doing things the old-fashioned way was commonplace. Elias later journeyed to Europe to apprentice in the kitchens of masters. It was there that he rediscovered the art of curing meat and found inspiration in the markets and mountain towns of the old world.
The experience affirmed what he’d been taught all along: handmade is better.
Back in beautiful Portland, Oregon, Elias set out to approach the craft of charcuterie with purity and patience, recreating a nearly extinct traditional technique that is seldom seen in America.
The result is Olympia Provisions, Oregon’s first USDA-approved salumeria, established in 2009, deeply rooted in the past.
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