Hi, we are Underground Meats. We make salami.

The Underground Food Collective and Underground Meats is a group of people who love food and sharing it with our friends and family. We’ve been cooking and producing sustainable local food for years, supporting area farmers and growers. We started small, building off catering events, pop-up dinners, and word-of-mouth to open a couple restaurants, a catering facility, a meat/charcuterie production facility and a butcher shop. We feel extremely grateful and lucky for our success. We had a lot of help from our friends and family to get to this point.

You guys know about rules, right?

Up this point we’ve faced many obstacles and hurdles along the way. One of the most challenging of those obstacles was opening our charcuterie production facility. State and federal guidelines for salami production are complex and cost-prohibitive. The government requires a detailed food safety and sanitary practice plan. This is known as a HACCP, which stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. Essentially, the state/feds want to make sure your product is safe for consumption and your HACCP plan will be a detailed document explaining how you will operate and most crucially how you will keep levels of contaminates safe in your product for your consumers.

The access to information is blocked...

Up until now, salami producers in the United States have held their HACCP plans under lock and key as intellectual property. This is understandable, producers generally need to hire an outside source to validate their procedures and techniques to the state/federal agencies. These expensive studies and product testing (thousands of dollars to start) are crippling to many small to medium salami production facilities.

We want to SHARE it.

Our goal is to create a transparent, concise HACCP model for small salami producers to use including the crucial links to studies and validation for procedure.

We will use Kickstarter funds to:

•create a dry cured salami production HACCP plan and share it with the world. We'll release the plan under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

•Get our salami out there! We want more of you to be excited about the traditional aspects of our product, and about sustainability as it pertains to meat consumption in general.

•Provide instructional videos and templates to our salami-making process. We carry out the process all day, every day, and we can't wait to share it with you in more dynamic forms.

Check out our other instructional videos on Vimeo here.

•Invite you in. Come see our facility! Get to know us and our tools!

•For top tier supporters, we will personally help you write your HACCP plan and provide studies and documentation to support and validate your procedure.

** Let’s make our local food more accessible and safe. **

Our hogs at Rollercoaster Farms, Darlington, WI.

Jerry teaching a Whole Hog Breakdown class.

Small Format Salami Product Line :

• Saucisson Sec • black pepper, garlic

• Goat Salami • rosemary, cinnamon, 75% goat, 25% pork

• Spanish Chorizo • smoked paprika, cayenne, chili pepper

• Finocchiona • fennel, white pepper

Large Diameter Salami Product Line:

• Peperone • anise, paprika, cayenne

• Tuscan Salami • toasted fennel, red wine

• Soppressata • allspice, chili, white pepper

Underground Meats Tote

From our friends at Baggu- a bag made with 100% Recycled Cotton, screenprinted down the street in Madison, WI at Screen Door Studio Studios. Logo work done by the creative gentlemen of Art and Sons, Madison, WI.

Expanding Nationwide

We CAN'T WAIT to be able to sell nationwide in a more expansive and accessible way. Currently we can only distribute to stores in Wisconsin, and must sell retail to the rest of the United States. Our new HACCP plan will make this possible. Here is a map of where we sold our meats online for the month of May 2013:

Music in our Kickstarter video by: the amazing Dietrich Gosser. He works with us here in Madison, Wisconsin, and just put out a new album. Give it a listen here.