The final cut

WAUPACA – Niemuth’s Steak & Chop Shop has closed its doors. The landmark butcher shop was known for its natural-skin casing hot dogs, ringed bologna, thick-cut bacon, summer sausage, hot sticks, landjaeger, slabs of steaks and a much-in-demand potato salad. In the freezer were walleye fingers, perch cheeks and fish fillets and in tubs near the meat counter were smoked beef knuckle bones for very lucky dogs.
This is a place where slices of meat were hand-wrapped in butcher paper and the contents were labeled in an employee’s handwriting, often accompanied by a sketched smiley face. This was a world where bar codes and scanners did not exist.
“We are just not making it,” said 18-year-old Kylie Niemuth who helps manage the shop with her mother, Holly Niemuth. “We’ve been trying our best but we just didn’t have the additional funds.”
They’ve had problems with malfunctioning freezers and one smokehouse is down.
The butcher shop was founded by Kylie’s grandfather, Bob Niemuth. He had five children and two sons, Bobby and Roger, followed him into the family business. Holly married Bobby. Bobby died in 2016 and Roger passed in 2021. Kylie and Holly Niemuth have been running the business alone as a mother-daughter team since then.

The butcher shop started in 1957 on Main Street in Waupaca and was a side business for Bob Niemuth’s first business, the Crystal River Mink Ranch. His idea was he could feed the meat scraps to the carnivorous mink as a money saver. Kylie remembers that he would stay up at night to hand-feed the smoker with chunks of wood. This was in the days before electronics and wood pellets enabled makers of smoked meats to set-it-and-forget-it.
They have 27 employees and this closure is of no surprise to any of them. They have made their future plans, along with Kylie who will work as a resident assistant and Holly will work as a veterinary technician.
Kylie said the business is for sale, there are some showings lined up, and there is a chance it will still continue on as a butcher shop. Included in the sale are equipment, appliances and their family’s secret potato salad recipe.