Sunday, March 9, 2014

Zaycon Foods Chicken Event

We recently purchased 40 pounds of fresh boneless skinless chicken breasts from Zaycon Foods. We were able to purchase the chicken for $1.89/lb. The lowest price I typically see boneless skinless chicken breasts at Meijer is $1.85/lb, so this was a stock up price for us.

(I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about Zaycon Foods, but you can visit their website here for more information on the company and how it works.)

Here is step-by-step how this worked for us:

1) I went to the Zaycon Foods website and created an account. Based on my city, I chose an event I wanted to participate in, in this case, the chicken event. I chose how many cases of chicken I wanted (the chicken was sold in 40 pound cases). I paid for the chicken online.

2) A few months later, the Zaycon Foods truck came to our city and I drove to it to pick up the chicken. I gave the driver my name, he checked me off his list, and loaded the case of chicken into my truck (on top of a plastic bag, in case the juices leaked!) Here is our case of chicken:

3) When I got home, I began to prep to freeze the chicken. The chicken came in 4 bags inside the box. If I froze it like that, I would end up with a big block of chicken frozen together. I needed to separate them into freezer ziploc bags. Here is my set up for freezer prep:

4) I separated the butterflied chicken breasts and trimmed the fat:

5) Once the chicken breasts were prepped to my liking, I put them into gallon Ziploc freezer bags. I chose to put 4 in each bag because I don't typically ever need more than 4 for a single meal. I ended up with 9 bags of full chicken breasts, plus 1 bag of smaller pieces that I trimmed off.

I chose to freeze all 40 pounds of our chicken, however I have heard people that freeze some, cook some right away, or prep it for other meals, like shredding.

I would definitely do this again! Let me know if you have any questions about Zaycon Foods or our experience.