WCCO Viewers’ Choice For Best Sausage In MinnesotaBack in the day, every town had to have a meat market. They were a necessity, says Ryan Schmidt, owner of Schmidt's Meat Market in Nicollet. "Meat markets, butcher shops in small towns used to service a 10-mile area of the farmers that surrounded that," Schmidt said. "They didn't have a cold storage, so they would rent lockers from butcher shops and meat markets." Nowadays, only some towns are lucky enough to still have one.