Walk into a grocery store and you can just as easily find Australian beef or Brazilian beef on the shelf as anything raised down the road. For Jeff Veldjesgraaf, that never sat right.
“We realized that there was always a shortage of promoting Canadian products, and Ontario product,” said Jeff, who runs JTK Meat Shoppe alongside his wife Tanya and son, Shawn. As a farming family with 30 years in the hog industry, the gap felt personal. “You can’t support outside farmers if they’re taking away from the ones that are actually working hard for you.”
That conviction became the shop’s foundation. “We are 100% Canadian,” Jeff said. Vegetables, by necessity, come from a global market, but the meat counter doesn’t bend. “We’ll never ever deviate from that.”
JTK Meat Shoppe started small and this August marks ten years since it officially opened its doors in 2016. In that decade, it’s grown from a single freezer into a full shop with its own Smoke and Grill, a transformation Jeff still finds a little astonishing. “For something that we started with one freezer, to work to where we are now — we’re very proud of it.”
What Jeff is proudest of, though, isn’t the growth in square footage — it’s who’s standing beside him. With Shawn now stepping fully into the business, succession has shifted from a distant worry into a lived reality. “Now with Shawn coming on board, it makes me prouder, because I’m actually handing off to family,” Jeff said. “My wife and I built this, and now I feel very confident that our exit is my two boys, and that makes me feel incredibly happy, very proud. I am still involved in all day to day aspects and still work the smokers and in the shop when needed”. The shop now supports just under 30 staff, most of them local and many part-time — a scale that still catches Jeff off guard when the whole team gathers in one room. “It’s quite cool to see everybody in the same room all together.”
Running a business for a decade has taught Jeff a simple, if hard-won, philosophy: “There’s always tomorrow.” No matter how rough a day gets, he said, there’s another one coming to fix it. “If we can’t fix it, say, hey, we’ll fix it tomorrow.” It’s a mindset he’s leaned on through the inevitable swings of the business — the days when everything works, and the days when, as Jeff put it, they can go from a great day to a bad day.
Ask Jeff for advice for a brand-new startup, and his first answer is blunt: “Don’t.” Pressed to elaborate, though, the real message comes through — long hours, thin income in the early years, and a government that talks up small business support while making the path genuinely difficult. “If somebody tells me to start up your own company, just head down, don’t look up, and just knuckle through it.” Shawn, learning the operational side of the business firsthand, offers the same grounded advice from someone still in the trenches: “You gotta just keep on going. It’s not fun all the time, but you just gotta keep on keeping on. It’s gonna get better eventually.” For both of them, passion is what separates the businesses that make it from the ones that don’t. “I found people who are passionate about what they do make it, because they don’t take no for an answer.”
With the ten-year mark here and succession underway, JTK is looking toward expansion — a necessity, Jeff says, given how tight their current footprint has become. Whether that growth happens on-site or elsewhere will depend on available space and local zoning, but more room is the goal either way. That extra space would also open the door to new product lines and partnerships, including a collaboration currently in the works with a group of farmers to ensure our beef source is over 80% Ontario beef. The bigger ambition is to become a true one-stop shop for customers. “I want people to shop here, knowing they are supporting local farmers.
For both Jeff and Shawn, doing business in Rural Oxford comes down to something simple: working where you live. “You meet your customer base everywhere,” Jeff said — around town, alongside the road, wherever life happens to intersect. Oxford County’s mix of scenic farmland and a dense network of small businesses, he added, is core to what makes the region work. A trip into Woodstock for supper often turns into a string of familiar faces. “You can walk uptown Woodstock, and fifteen people at the restaurant know who you are.” It’s not about ego, he’s quick to clarify — it’s the sense of community that comes with it. “It’s kind of nice, you walk by — hey Jeff, hey Shawn. It’s like, yeah, saw you in the shop yesterday.”
Ten years in, that same community is what JTK Meat Shoppe continues to build itself around — one local partnership, one familiar face, and one 100% Canadian cut at a time.
JTK Meat Shoppe
Jeff & Shawn Veldjesgraaf
293193 Culloden Line, Verschoyle, ON
South-West Oxford Township
Established 2016
jtkmeatshoppe.com
facebook.com/JTKFarmsMeatShoppe
@jtkfarms_meatshoppe
