Zaycon Fresh: Our First Chicken Pickup!

Looking to save money on meat? Buy it in bulk from Zaycon Fresh!

You know I’m all about saving money on groceries whenever I can. I’ve been hearing about Zaycon Fresh for over a year now, yet I was hesitant to try. In my head, 40 pounds of chicken is quite a bit, even for our family of five. As the year went on, I thought more and more about ordering from Zaycon–plus I heard so many rave reviews! With grocery prices going through the roof, cheap meat is hard to come by.

Here are common questions I’ve gotten since I picked up my first order. I shared my journey on SnapChat and Facebook–many people were intrigued!

What IS Zaycon anyway? Zaycon available nationwide and they deliver your meat by an event in a truck. The events seem to happen about every 3 months in my area. They offer beef, pork, chicken and seafood and super low prices. Their goal is to have high quality products and affordable prices. For more information, here’s their about page.

How do you order? Where do you pickup? All orders are placed online and the truck is parked at certain locations in your city from a certain time frame. Ours had a 2 hour window for pickup. You line up in your car, pop your trunk when you’re at the front of the line and they load your box in the car for you! How cool is that? The chicken was raw, not frozen.

What the heck do you do with 40 pounds of chicken? It is a LOT of chicken. Since it comes raw, not frozen you have to be ready to prep it for the freezer. This task took me about 45 minutes. If you only have one fridge, you can either split an order with another person or look into a standing freezer. As a budget shopper, my standing freezer in the basement is a lifesaver. I can stock up on markdown meats, discounted bread and more–it quickly pays for itself!

Here was my game plan for 40 pounds of chicken:

Helpful items: a box of gloves, cookie sheets, a food scale, fold top baggies, permanent marker/labels, freezer bags: quart and gallon, dressings or favorite marinades. See photo above to see my suggestions.
Trim all chicken into smaller pieces. The breasts are HUGE (like 2 pounds!). About 1/3 of the order was trimmed and put into individual bags. Some were kept as full pieces and others were cut into strips.
For marinades, I trimmed the chicken and weighed it to 1-2 pounds, pre-marinade. I put the marinades in the bags and laid them flat on a cookie sheet to freeze flat. Once frozen, I placed them in plastic containers inside of the freezer.

Overall first impressions:

I have had some bad experiences with chicken lately when I purchase it from the grocery store. We normally purchase large bags from Costco and that was the only brand I would trust to have good, quality chicken. Until now! This meat is SUPER juicy, cooks up so well and we will be ordering again in the future. Aside from the first day having to trim and cut the chicken up for the freezer, it has been a lifesaver! The next delivery is early spring and I think we’ll be ready by then to order again. I’m also looking into smoked sausage, bacon and seafood. It really does save quite a bit of money by cutting out the middle man.

Right now, there’s a 5% off sale for meat until December 5th by using code SALE2015. I would love if you used my referral link: https://www.zayconfresh.com/refer/dashofevans . This allows us to get credits for future orders! Obviously, no pressure at all. The chicken with this sale comes to $1.69/lb!