DEVERS, Texas — It’s a busy time for harvesters in Southeast Texas with a big Easter weekend coming up.
The crawfish farm Texas Crawdaddy's is pumping out sack after sack of crawfish for Easter weekend.
"This is the Mecca. We call it,” said Texas Crawdaddy's owner Shane Chesson. “It's holy week, that's what all the guys in the crawfish business call it. It's holy week."
There’s a process to get the crawfish from the farm to your table.
"That's the finished product right there. A good clean sack of crawfish ready to go straight out of that sack and into your pot," Chesson said.
The owner and his team at Texas Crawdaddy’s are hard at work pumping out thousands of mudbugs ahead of Easter weekend.
"Twenty-something years we've been doing this so we've kind of got it down to where we've got it pretty productive," Chesson said.
And they have to be, considering sales nearly double this week.
"Anybody that was born and raised down here in this area knows pretty much that when Easter rolls around you eat crawfish on Easter. It's like part of our culture down here,” Chesson said.
Every day this week, close to 200 sacks are being purged, cleaned, and stored.
"That’s all for a catering job I got to do tomorrow. I got to cook 6,000 pounds of crawfish," Chesson said.
From the barn to the restaurant, where like everywhere, prices are up.
"Prices are up $1.50 at least, from where we were last year," said Lacy JuJu Carter, owner of JuJu's Cajun Crawfish Shak. "But then you have to think, it's not just crawfish. It's everything else that's gone up."
But customers don't seem to mind.
"We eat it every day. We eat left and right overs," said crawfish lover Paul Washington.
One customer said they eat crawfish every day. Another customer told 12News today was their second time eating at JuJu's in a week.
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