trulocal.ca for healthy, local meat and seafood delivered to your home or workplace

Tl;dr version: TruLocal delivers a wide variety of local meat, poultry, and seafood from family farms to your door. They serve Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. And they're great!

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When we lived in Ontario, we often ordered meat from Beretta Farms. Beretta distributes products from small, local farms, as well as from their own, located in King City, Ontario. (Here's an old post about them.)

Distribution is often the missing link between consumers and healthy, local, non-factory-farmed meat, as the large supermarket chains buy in huge volumes that, by definition, excludes these producers.

I personally am not opposed to humans eating animal products, and I quite love them myself. But the horrors of the factory farm are legion -- for animals, for the environment, for human health, for climate change. So I would try to buy meat and poultry either from Beretta, or from Whole Foods, where I could see the local origin.

Now that we live in a small town in a remote area, I assumed those choices would no longer be available. There is one supermarket, and naturally it has to cater to the majority of the community. So I was surprised and pleased to find a small frozen case with a smattering of meat, pork, and chicken from small and organic producers. Prices are high and selection is low, but I'm very glad this option exists.

Finding TruLocal has resolved this issue for me.

TruLocal is set up like a meal-kit delivery service. You subscribe to a box (there are two sizes), which you can have delivered weekly, biweekly or monthly. The price of the box is a flat rate, and you choose what to fill your box with, using a clever point system. A pound of ground beef may be 1 point, while a half-pound of smoked sockeye salmon will be 4 points. A small box for $125 is filled with 9 points worth of food, while a regular-sized box for $249 is filled by 20 points.

The box is delivered to your home or workplace, with the contents packed in dry ice. Based on your postal code, the website tells you what day(s) of the week they ship to your area, then you receive auto-emails with updates. Delivery is free, that is, part of the price.

I appreciate that there wasn't an extra charge for a rural or remote delivery. In fact, I appreciate that they service our area at all! I emailed to ask, and received a very speedy, friendly reply.

So far everything about TruLocal has been great: the order was correct, the delivery was reliable, customer service is great, and most importantly, the products are very high quality.

My only (minor) gripe is that if you don't want a subscription -- if you want to order less frequently or sporadically -- you have to cancel your subscription and start a new one each time. (You don't have to cancel your account, just the subscription.) I'm hoping that enough customers will want this option that TruLocal will soon offer it.

Here's how it works, and here's an FAQ. If you're an omnivore like me and can afford it, perhaps you will give it a try.