L to R: Brian Meloni, Joseph Meloni Sr. and Joey Meloni

With the Great Depression barreling down and being without a job, Joseph Meloni scrounged around his native South Philly looking for a way to make money. He found work sweeping the floor for a neighborhood butcher who catered to the big Italian families that spent weekends stewing up items like pork necks, sweet sausage and veal bones for Sunday supper. 

Meloni mastered the meat-cutting art himself and eventually opened his own butcher shop on the corner of Tasker and Iseminger streets, just four blocks off South Broad Street. Business boomed and he expanded, opening a second shop, on 13th Street, where he taught his trade to son Umberto, who departed for the Jersey Shore and set up his own shop in Ventnor.

Today, the Meloni family butcher business thrives in a suburban strip mall on Black Horse Pike in Turnersville, about 20 minutes outside Philadelphia. By 11 o’clock most mornings, customers are lined up six and seven deep at the counter to buy veal cutlets, aged filet of beef or quarts of long-simmered Bolognese sauce and other staples. 

The newest member of the clan in the business is Joseph Meloni’s great-grandson, 29-year-old Joey Meloni. He learned  from the bottom up. But the fourth-generation Meloni comes with a big difference: Joey doesn’t eat meat.

Meloni is  one of a growing number of people who don’t eat meat or animal products. Six percent of Americans now say they are vegan, a trend that has accelerated rapidly in recent years as consumers adopt more climate-friendly lifestyles. 

“Don’t like it. Don’t want to eat it, ” Meloni says, summing up his take on meat. “I’m a vegan. I guess you can call me a vegan butcher.” 

The vegan way

Meloni says he went vegan in 2016 while working on a degree in nutrition at Drexel University. In 2021 he opened his own store, called Taste: Plant Based, and began selling freshly prepared specialties like eggplant meatballs, chickpea tikka masala, lentil Bolognese, “chick’n parm” and the ever popular penne with pumpkin sauce. 

The Melonis tell their story: Video by Laura Galarza

The catch: Meloni’s vegan shop occupies a storefront right next to the family shop run by his dad, Joe Sr., and uncle Brian. While the elder Melonis may not cotton to soy balls and lentil-based spaghetti sauce, they embraced the idea of a vegan competitor next door.

Meloni says he’s been very careful to show respect for the family business and to refrain from criticizing meat eating, especially around his elders or their customers. 

‘If we had to rely on just doing traditional butchering, the business wouldn’t have survived.’

Brian meloni

If there’s any philosophical tension between the generations, it’s hard to see. On one recent morning Meloni, his dad and uncle Brian sat in an office over the butcher shop trading family stories and reflecting on changing consumer tastes and habits.

They chuckled over the irony of a meatless Meloni.

“Yeah, it’s funny,” said Joe Meloni Sr. “But Joey had a dream and a vision, and he was serious about following it. So I wanted to support him do what he wanted.”

Good business

It also made good business sense, he said, as more and more customers started to search for meatless options in the Butcher Block’s gleaming refrigerator cases stocked with freshmade specialties like chicken parm, Italian wedding soup, beef Wellington and slow-roasted porchetta.

Brian Meloni, a St. Joseph’s University graduate with a degree in food marketing, said adaptations like the new vegan store have been the secret ingredient in the success of the family business. Over the years, he said, the family followed clientele as it moved out of the city, first to the Jersey Shore and later to the bedroom communities outside Philadelphia in South Jersey.

When he first decided to join the business, in the mid-1990s, Brian Meloni recognized that busy suburban families had little time to prepare traditional Italian meals that involved hours of braising beef or rolling meatballs by hand. 

‘If everything tastes good the choice between meat or no meat doesn’t matter.’

Ann Marie Johnson, a customer

So he amped up production of homemade soups and sauces, packaged pasta dishes and prepared entrees using old family recipes and know-how first developed by his grandfather in South Philly. Food prep workers — the store employs dozens — fill the Melonis’ kitchen complex by 7 a.m. most days to start chopping vegetables, sauteing cutlets and making pesto and tomato sauce.

Some customers, but not many, still ask for hand-trimmed chops or specially cut roasts. 

“We’ll still do traditional meat cutting for people if they want it,” Brian said. “But most people are just looking for something good for the family dinner. If we had to rely on just doing traditional butchering, the business wouldn’t have survived. The customer base has changed, and you have to change with it.”

National trend

With some ups and downs, meat consumption in the U.S. has averaged 250 pounds per person over the past 20 years, according to government data. The big change has come in the type of meat people eat, with chicken and pork consumption on the rise. Beef-eating declined from 97 pounds per capita to 83 pounds in 2020, the data show.

Studies show that the number of U.S. consumers who say they are vegan has risen by 500% since 2014. According to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes the use of food from nonanimal sources, the sales of plant-based foods grew three times faster than overall food sales in 2021. 

At the same time, however, consumers are flocking to artisanal food stores of all kinds that focus on locally grown products made by craftspeople. Neighborhood butchers and meat markets that deal in locally grown beef, chicken and pork are seeing a boom, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, which reports there has been a steady rise in the number of cooperatives offering locally grown  food.

“I don’t really see myself as a vegetarian or a carnivore either. I just like good and healthy food,” said Camden County resident Ann Marie Johnson, who stopped at the Melonis’ one morning in May. “If I come here, I can get really good eggplant meatballs and chicken homemade pot pie right next door.”

“If everything tastes good the choice between meat or no meat doesn’t matter.”

(All photographs by Laura Galarza; NJ Spotlight News)