Our Founder, Talmadge Phillips, Came home from WWII in 1947with his brother Parker and started cutting meat for the general public at Cummings Frozen Foods in Asheboro, North Carolina. While they worked along side Mr. Cummings they saw a demand for cured
meats to be added to the butcher shop and freezer locker business they
already worked in. Mr. Cummings allowed the two early twenties
gentleman to use a portion of the business to start curing meats for the
public and Phillips Brothers Country Hams was born.
Now for some of the younger generation in 1947 home storage of frozen meats was a luxury most did not have. A freezer locker was a place that you would bring animals you raised or meat that you had bought to be cut up and packaged. You would pay somewhere around $10 a month to store your meats in large lockers that looked a lot like something you would store clothing in only made of metal. the room they were kept in was kept at -20 Fahrenheit. A locker attendant would pull your file of what your locker number was and the contents of the locker. You would tell them what you wanted out of your locker and for 10 cents he would go retrieve it. The freezer locker concept is long gone now but the original wooden freezer door still stands in its placed in our retail area. We opened up the old freezer locker room to add more retail area in 2006. Some of the original equipment still hangs from the ceilings and the old butcher block now holds our custom gift boxes.
In the beginning the Phillips Brothers was producing about 150-200 hams a year for the public. It grew fast over the next 30 years and they began to produce nearly 500,000 hams a year! But as time went on families grew smaller and there was not the big demand for whole hams so Phillips Brothers Country Hams changed with the times. In 2001, we started packaging our ham in individual slices for the first time ever. Now we are carried and sold in several local independent grocery stores, convenient stores and specialty food vendors.
Please feel free to stop by and just brows our store. We have a lot of history sitting around and hanging on the walls. Young or old, you'll find something that interest you or tickle your taste buds here at Phillips Brothers Country Hams!
