Packing them in 50-year-old Mike’s Packing Co. remains a neighborhood staple
Mike’s Packing Co. was built by Mike Provenzano in 1965 for his son, Mickey, who was killed in a truck accident a few years later. Mike’s daughter, Helen Provenzano, the current owner, started working evenings then took ownership with her dad until he died in 2003 at 88.
One of Mike’s Packing Co.’s most popular seller besides their fresh meat, is pickled beets. The store also sells items like honey and jams.
Helen Provenzano is the owner of Mike’s Packing Co. on Weirich Avenue in Washington. Mike’s has been open for 50 years. Provenzano said the store’s most popular item is the fresh hamburger.
For most of her 73 years, Helen Provenzano has worked in the meatpacking business in Washington County.
“I think I started when I was in first or second grade,” she recalled last week as she moved among the retail and preparation rooms in her pristine white butcher’s coat at Mike’s Packing Co., on Weirich Avenue in Washington’s Lincoln Hill section.
Helen’s father, Mike Provenzano, literally built the business in 1965 for his son, Mickey, who was killed in a truck accident only a couple of years later. At the time, Helen was working for an insurance company, but helped out in the evenings. She later assumed ownership of the business while working alongside her father, who died in 2003 at age 88.
Helen’s knowledge of the business began when her father, who had operated a small meatpacking business during World War II, went on to build the original Green Valley Packing Co. near Taylorstown, where she helped her first customers.
“Some of them can remember me when we had Green Valley,” she said.
Mike Provenzano sold the business in 1965 to George Weiss, who expanded it into one of the larger meatpacking houses in the area.
Helen said her customers, some of whom come from as far as West Virginia, keep returning for meat that couldn’t be fresher.
Cattle arrive at the rear of the building and are led to a room where they are quickly and humanely dispatched and butchered, briefly aged in cooling lockers, then transformed into the various cuts of meat that are sold in the long, white refrigerated cases in the retail area.
While the process has remained the same – butchering on Tuesdays, boning out the carcasses on Wednesdays – Helen acknowledges some changes in the business over the years.
“I remember when hamburger was 49 cents a pound, then it went to 69 cents a pound and now it’s $3.89 a pound,” she said.
Despite the store’s constant offerings of steaks and roasts, “the best seller is ground meat,” she said.
As she introduces butchers Collin Hillberry of Waynesburg and Cam Bishop of St. Clairsville, Ohio, a clerk from the front room asks Bishop if he can prepare 30 pounds of ground meat for a customer.
“We sell so much ground meat here, I can’t believe it,” she said, noting that most of her customers are retail, not commercial.
“Sometimes the orders are for 50 pounds, sometimes they’re for 60 pounds,” she said, adding that most customers ask for their hamburger to be wrapped in one-pound packages.
Like most owners whose small businesses see a half-century, Helen can remember how Mike’s was once touched by the workings of the larger economy.
She recalled a time when customers were briefly “frozen” out of beef purchases.
In the early 1970s, a national movement among consumers was formed to protest high food prices, especially meat, because of spiraling inflation.
President Richard Nixon, who instituted a number of wage-price controls, briefly ordered a freeze on beef prices, which may have actually caused a scarcity of the product.
Provenzano showed a faded undated clipping from the Observer-Reporter displaying a black-and-white photo of customers in multiple lines inside the store’s retail area, waiting to make meat purchases.
In those days, the store stayed open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays, “but we couldn’t because we didn’t have any beef to sell,” she recalled.
Despite ups and downs in the economy, Mike’s has remained stalwart as a neighborhood meat market.
And it’s still a family place, with Helen’s staff of six including a niece, Melissa Comer, and a cousin, Peggy Jean Sonson.
In addition to selling locally raised beef, Mike’s also gives a nod to local suppliers in its retail area, with jellies, jams and pickled beets produced by the Amish, lunch meats from Green Valley Packing’s Albert’s brand, fresh bread and rolls from Joe’s Bakery in Washington, and honey from Bedillion’s Honey Farm in Hickory.
Along the way, there’s been room for new demand, too.
Helen said in recent years she’s seen an upswing in sales of beef tongue to her Mexican customers.
“We can’t keep them in stock,” she said. “They use them to make tacos.”