Profile: Peter Swerdlow, kosher butcher

(photo by Joeff Davis)

A native of South Africa, Peter Swerdlow moved to Atlanta 11 years ago to work as a software consultant. When the dot-com bust left him unemployed, he found a way to make ends meet: make friends meat.

What started as sausage-making in his kitchen is now Griller's Pride, a full-service kosher butchery in Doraville with customers all over the country.

Thanksgiving is his third-busiest time of year, following Passover and Rosh Hashanah.

Swerdlow says he's sold about 500 turkeys in the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. "That's a lot of turkeys, believe me."

Kosher turkeys are slaughtered by slitting their throats, then draining the blood.

Lesions, broken bones or even strange preslaughter behavior is enough to disqualify a bird from kosher status.

Swerdlow gets most of his poultry from Canada. "Canadians far and away have the cleanest and most featherless poultry you can get."

Swerdlow's turkeys are kosher when they arrive at his plant, but he also has kosher and USDA inspectors on-site to be sure.

His grandfather was a butcher and his father built slaughterhouses.

Despite his pedigree, Swerdlow says he never expected to get into butchery. "That was the furthest thing from my mind."

On running a delivery-based business: "Atlanta is so dispersed that wherever we located a store would be out of the way of 70 percent of the market."

Swerdlow delivers meats by truck throughout metro Atlanta and to several cities in the Southeast. He has mail-order customers as far away as Switzerland.