The McLean family has raised cattle near Benedict since 1949, but McLean Beef as you’d meet it today started in 1999 when Jeanette McLean began selling their beef direct — and opened its own butcher shop in York in 2021. Max McLean hand-picks the cattle from the family feedlot, and every carcass is dry-aged 21 days.
The York shop is the full experience: custom-cut counter, smoked meats, a café doing breakfast and lunch, and — the detail that makes it unmistakably Nebraska — a 24/7 meat vending machine stocked with steaks, roasts, ground beef, and smoked beef sticks for travelers on I-80. They ship to the lower 48 if you can’t make the drive.