Home Based Sausage Business

Why Sausages ?

Backgrounder

My grandfather, Walter Dillon, was a pork butcher in Dublin, Ireland from the 1930's to 1950's . If you go to the rear of 4 Glengariff Parade in Dublin, you will see the remnants of his small processing plant where he butchered the whole hog and broke it down to produce the choice meat cuts as well as things like head cheese, dripping and sausages. I don't know how good the sausages were but the Irish are known for making great breakfast sausages.

After finishing his job at the home plant, my grandfather would load orders into an 8 foot aluminum bicycle trailer to deliver ( uphill) to the local butchers stores. When he was done, he went off to the local pub for a well deserved pint. One thing abot Dublin, you will never have trouble finding a pub--they are simply everywhere.

My own sausage awakening came in a conversation with Fred Ploder, a real estate colleague in Toronto in the mid 1980's . Fred came in one day and starting talking about making sausages at home. This intrigued me. After a few months of talking and sampling, I finally got myself invited over to help make these sausages. That was quite the ordeal. I should have quit right there and I would of except for one thing: they tasted great. Awesome, in fact. (Don't worry I will show you a few short cuts that cut out most of the grunt work.)

Difference between a Sausage Maker and A Butcher

Both these artisans are kind of hard to find these days. Most meat at the Supermarket comes in pre-packed in some kind of "air modified" container straight from the factory. In Cobourg and Peterborough area of Ontario, we still have a number of independent butchers but they are few are far between. Sausagemakers are even rarer. The difference: Sausage makers start with a good quality sausage in mind from the spices to the most appropriate cuts of meat. Butchers see sausages as a great way to use scrap meat. Fat content can very a lot. Flavours tend to be bland at best because they use boring pre-mixed spices.

A lot of butchers will say they use there own spices and fillers but a few quick questions can usually reveal the truth. Ask them what spices are in each, what does he or she use for heat?. How much salt is in the sausage? What kind of salt? What kind of filler? Wheat or soya ? Are there dairy ingredients? If the answer is nebulous and not clear it's because it's premixed spice which doesn't often disclose this kind of information. Don't let the fool you by saying it's trade secret. You have a right to know the ingredients of what you are eating.

I made home made spaghetti last night for dinner. It was reasonable but I commented that it reminded me of "hamburger helper" but at least I know what all went into it. Same with your homemade sausage.

Sausages as Fast Food and Gourmet Food

Sausages are the world's oldest fast foods. The dried and smoked ones are ready to eat and were a favorite for 1,000's of years before refrigeration made the fresh sausage a real possibility for people living anywhere. The advantage of the fresh sausage is that it can be made with no artificial ingredients and no preservative chemicals. These are the kind we are going to discuss. What you can make is a gourmet meal disguised as a sausage. In this website we give you 30 recipes which you can use or modify as you wish. This is the real key: you can alter the spices slightly to please yourself and you can also decide to use pork shoulders or very lean pork. You get to control what you eat and make a gourmet meal in the process. All our recipes were used in our commercial sausage kitchen and were sold with good success. Many people had their favorites. I remember one lady in Lakefield said she was a vegetarian except for our sausauges. Some flavours like the Russian or our Louisiana sausages appealed to a smaller but enthusiastic group of devotees.

 Colm Making Sausages in his Home Kitchen

Home Business: Making Sausages

Our Sausage Kitchen

This really the story of what not to do in a home based business. Just because it's home based doen't mean you don't have to think seriously about potential sales, overhead, location and general market conditions. I have learnt the hard way and that's one reason I do what I do now. Bottom line is you need customers: that goes for home business or big business.   After I got the "sausage bug" from Fred Ploder, I really started thinking about making them commercially. We (my wife Pat and I)  were always looking for good sausages anywhere we went but found none. (Still ten years later after closing the home business, we still have found none. (we have come close in meat quality but not in flavour) 

At the same time I had a strong desire to move to the country, away from the crowded streets of Toronto to a more rural area. We chose Bewdley on Rice Lake because it looked like a good place to do what I wanted. Before I go any further, I want to emphasize  that starting a home based sausage business was not the smartest thing I've ever done. My main objective was to make the best sausages you could buy. We did and you will reap the benefits here with our sausage recipes. I did not focus  on the "making money" part  assuming that if you made great sausages customers will flock to your door. Maybe they will, but first they have to know about your sausages . I didn't have the time or financial resources to make this happen. If I was to do it again, there are many things I would change but that's another story.

After spending all kinds of money on equipment, furnishings, signage , we finally opened up in May 1993 making about 10 varieties of sausages. No applause. Nobody in that area had the slightest idea what we were all about.

The place in Bewdley was less than ideal with a house much smaller than we had in Toronto but it had several outbuildings, two of which had income so it looked like a good deal at the time. Trouble was I didn't know about Bewdley when I bought there but I'm sure the ReMax agent who sold the property to me did. Let's say it doesn't have the greatest reputation for anything except maybe fishing, hunting, and cheap rent. Sometimes, I got the feeling that the visitors thought that this wasn't really part of Ontario and they could do anything they liked. It was kind of like what I imagine the Wild West was like. In hindsight, it was probably the worse location in Ontario to open a gourmet home sausage store. It was a great place for a bait, tackle or hunting shop but not for sausages.

People tell you things like customers will go anywhere for something good. Well they might for big items like good deals on fridges, stoves and automobiles--big ticket items but they won't travel for a package of sausages. We made up to 33 varieties of sausages. Most were pork, some chicken, some beef and some lamb. I have to say they were very big on flavour, low in fat and all natural. All natural was just a new thing in the early 90's. Business was good sometimes in the summer but it was basically the pits. I was commuting to my appraisal "job" in Toronto and later to Oshawa which was closer. The appraisal business was very slow in the early 90's so I just sort of drifted away and the sausage business took over.

Sales in Bewdley were lousy ( it is a very small village, so what could I expect?) so we investigated some farmer's markets. We subsequently went to markets in Toronto, Peterborough, Port Hope and Cobourg. Problem was that 3 out of 4 of these markets were only open for the summer so we basically starved in the winter. It wasn't any fun. It was just too much work making these sausages by hand with too little income. I just didn't think it was fair to me or my family to continue.

The sausage business was not all bad. I enjoyed making them, I enjoyed getting positive feed back from our customers which I still got even 10 years after we closed down. I did not enjoy all the washing up and cleaning up I had to do. I was a great learning experience for my children at a very impressionable age. In the mid nineties they would have been in their early teens. As in most home businesses children often help out. Besides doing jobs around the store like serving customers, handling cash and doing other odd jobs, they also went to the markets interacting with all kinds of customers and promoting the sausages. In order to do this they had to get up at 4 am to be on the road by 5 am so we could be at the Toronto market by 7 am. This was a big stretch for them but they did it. They certainly got a front row seat to running a small home based business. Both my children have excellent interpersonal skills and have always had great personal confidence in dealing one on one with adults. Now adults themselves these skills are becoming extremely beneficial in the work they do.

Your children watch you and even though they never admit it, you are a role model. Starting a home based business can have a wonderful impact on family life if the children and spouse are involved. I know this is not always possible but, when it is, it will create lifelong memories. If the business does note work out, start another one as I did with bread. It's good for the children to know that failure is not a person but an event and that if something does fail you simply start all over doing something else until you get it right.

I got into the bread business because of my farmers market experience. I would go to the Peterborough Farmers Market every Saturday. My booth was diagonally acrooss from Sticklings Bakery  which almost always had a crowd around it and was almost always sold out by 11.30 am. I got the now Michael, the baker and over time, I mentioned something about selling Stickling's bread to stores . So I started--one afternnon a week. I had no real idea of where to go or how to do it but I started. I went to 6 stores thatt I though might be interested--5 said ok so I started. One of these stores is still my customer after 14 years. The other 4 stores were ok but were really not the right market for the product. I did not know this then--It took me a about 5 years to finally figure out how to be successful in the bread business and I am still trying to figure it out.  Bread Roots  Inc was formed in 1996 and now serves health food stores across southern Ontario.

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