As the fields around Nova Scotia begin to give their late-summer produce, the flavours at Vessel Meats are changing, too.
For Brianna Hagell, owner and operator of the Dartmouth butcher shop, the weeks between the end of summer and Thanksgiving are an opportunity to bring the province’s harvest into the products her team makes in-house.
That means locally grown jalapeños, fermented hot peppers, tomatoes and other seasonal produce are finding their way into Vessel’s sausages and prepared products.
Last week, the shop made what Hagell calls a “hodgepodge sausage,” inspired by a Nova Scotia chowder. More seasonal products are planned as farmers’ markets and gardens continue to produce.
“We’re gonna have a bunch of jalapenos, fermented hot peppers, because those are all in season right now,” she says. “You know, my partner and I have a bunch of stuff coming out of our garden, so we’re dehydrating a bunch of tomatoes. All these things, we put in our sausages.”
For a business built around meat, Hagell sees the fall harvest as about more than a change in ingredients. It is also about changing how meat is prepared and what customers see in the display case.
“One thing I really like about our seasons here in Nova Scotia is that we have such diverse seasonal eating,” she says. “In the summertime, it’s obviously grilling time. In the wintertime, it’s braising time and stewing time. And the fall is really that transition.”
That transition is reflected in the shop’s approach to breaking down animals and preparing cuts for customers.
“So, like, we shift how we break the animals down to, like, accommodate the seasons,” Hagell says, “and you see different things in the window.”
Business philosophy
Vessel’s emphasis on seasonality is part of a larger philosophy that Hagell has had since she started the business in 2014.
Her background was in human resources and industrial work, but she had a longstanding interest in food. She eventually left that career and began working at Noggins in Dartmouth, selling produce at Alderney Landing.
“I was like, I want to be the person that provides chefs with really good food,” Hagell says.
To learn more about where food came from and how it was handled, she began working one day a week in a butcher shop. What started as an experiment eventually became a full-time career in meat.
Vessel Meats began at the Alderney Farmers’ Market before expanding across Halifax Harbour to the Alexander Keith’s Brewery Market in 2019. Hagell later opened the company’s retail shop in Dartmouth.
The business was built around two ideas: making food she wanted to eat and creating a more direct relationship between consumers and the people producing their food.
“People don’t trust the meat industry,” Hagell says. “Some of those things, though, some of those fears are valid.”
She says food security was another reason she wanted to build a business based on local food.
“I was like, we’re going to run out of food,” she says. “Like, if we’re selling things that we’re telling people are local, if not local, it gives people this false impression of what’s available locally.”
Today, sourcing that meat means maintaining a network of farms rather than relying on one large supplier.
Hagell says the network has changed significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, with some farms downsizing or no longer supplying the business. New farms occasionally contact Vessel directly, while Hagell also works with a processor in Amherst to help procure meat from different farms.
The animals cannot simply be slaughtered and processed at the Vessel shop. They must go through an inspected facility before the meat reaches the butcher shop, creating another link in the local supply chain.
Supply chain limitations
For Hagell, the reality of local meat is more complicated than labels such as “organic” or “local” might suggest. “Nothing is perfect,” she says.
She says the farms Vessel works with range from multigenerational operations with established systems to newer farmers still figuring out how to make their businesses work.
“All the farms that we work with are listed on our website,” she says, adding that the list changes as availability changes.
“Most farms don’t have the capacity to provide us stuff every single week.”
That limitation is part of the reality of local food in Atlantic Canada. Unlike the massive livestock operations found in parts of Western Canada and elsewhere, much of the region’s beef, pork and lamb production comes from smaller farms. Animals can be raised on farms across the region before being transported to commercial or smaller inspected abattoirs for processing.
For consumers, that can mean a different kind of relationship with the product, and sometimes a different understanding of what “local” actually means.
The broader Canadian meat industry is substantial. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada says Canada’s red meat industry, including beef, veal, pork, lamb and mutton, goat, rabbit, horse, venison and bison had annual shipments worth $11.16 billion in 2025. About 70 per cent of processed meats such as sausages and cold cuts are made with pork.
Statistics Canada reported 11.1 million cattle and calves on Canadian farms on Jan. 1, 2026, along with 13.9 million hogs and 833,000 sheep and lambs.
The value of livestock production has also been rising. Statistics Canada reported that total livestock receipts increased 13.2 per cent to $45.3 billion in 2025, with cattle and hog receipts among the largest contributors to the increase.
Those national numbers represent an industry much larger than the one Vessel operates within.
Hagell says her business processes roughly one cow and two to four pigs a week, depending on demand.
That smaller scale is intentional.
“When you look at like, the amount of death, it’s like we actually feed a lot of people on a really small amount of animals,” Hagell says.
The shop uses the whole animal as much as possible, rather than treating certain cuts as the only valuable parts.
“When we do one cow, we get two flank stakes a week, we get two tariff majors a week,” she says. “And so we divide that up, we kind of send it to where it goes. And once it’s sold out, it’s sold out.”
That can mean customers don’t always find every cut they want. Hagell says Vessel could supplement its supply with commercially sourced meat, but doing so would undermine the purpose of the business. The approach also comes with a higher price.
“Basically we just try to have the best quality product all the time,” Hagell says.
“And so what that means is our product isn’t cheap.”
Affordability and sustainability
At a time when food prices continue to put pressure on household budgets, Hagell says the business is trying to keep prices as low as possible without compromising its approach.
“I didn’t build this business, create a product that nobody can afford,” she says.
Instead, she says, the shop is seeing customers make more deliberate choices about when they spend money on meat.
“They’re not coming as often, but they’re coming when they want something really good,” she says.
That focus on quality extends to the products Vessel makes itself. Hagell says the shop avoids preservatives and anti-caking agents and makes its sausage mixes in-house, sampling each batch before it reaches customers.
The shop now has about 150 different types of sausages, although not all are available at the same time.
“If you make the same seven things all the time, it’s just really boring for us,” Hagell says.
For the fall, that creativity is being paired with the abundance of the harvest.
Vessel’s kitchen is preserving produce such as fermented hot peppers and corn and freezing ingredients so they can be used throughout the season.
“We put all this stuff in the freezer so that all through the season, we have local ingredients available that we can use for our Products,” Hagell says.
It is an approach that connects the meat counter to the broader network of farmers, growers and producers behind it.
And for Hagell, that network is ultimately about more than food.
“The farm market is a really good second place for people where they can go, they can have conversations,” she says.
As harvest season moves toward Thanksgiving, Hagell says those relationships are what continue to drive the business.
“And for me, it’s like the community is the thing that, like, for our business is the thing that keeps us going,” she says.
Her plan is to keep the business rooted in those values, even as the cost of running it rises.
“Like, we’re not gonna cut corners,” Hagell says. “We’re just gonna keep doing our best to provide good options.
“And as things probably aren’t gonna get better, we’ll pivot as much as we can, but really stick to those values.”
