By Rod Bacon
After a hiatus due to the untimely passing of its owner, Parillo’s Sausage is in the process of being rebranded and expanded.
The 73-year-old business was closed in January due to the inability of second-generation owner Marc Parillo to operate it because of ill health. Marc’s daughter, Marisa Rahman, officially reopened it in November and is in the process of significantly expanding its market. In the interim she sold the company’s proprietary spices online, something her father never did.
“I obviously know the recipes so I sold the spices on my own,” she said. “I built a website and sold them on Etsy and they did pretty well.”
Rahman, who is currently employed full-time as a partner/sales director for a software company, has been involved with Parillo’s Sausage since she was 10 years old. At that age she wasn’t making sausage but over the years when her father suffered a couple of heart attacks she ran the business totally on her own.
“That’s why it wasn’t hard for me to pick it up now and run with it,” she said.
The business was started in 1951 by Rahman’s grandparents, Joseph and Ruth Parillo, in their garage on Elbern Street in Saratoga. In 1971 they purchased the building at 90 Washington Street in what is now a historic district of Saratoga Springs.
The Parillo family had a sausage business in Italy and some of the recipes could have originated with them. In any case, the recipes have been modified over the years to conform to market trends. Marc, for example, completely removed the sugar from the breakfast sausage and some special spices have been made a bit more spicy.
“The recipes have definitely changed but I wouldn’t say there’s been a dramatic change,” Rahman said.
The company’s signature offerings include sweet and hot Italian links, bulk sausage, and breakfast sausage. These are complemented by their proprietary seasoning blends that have been perfected over generations.
Throughout the company’s history their commercial customers have been primarily in Saratoga and Warren counties. They provide products to seven Hannaford Supermarkets as well as restaurants and pizza parlors in the area. Longtime clients include Mama Mia’s, the Barrelhouse, West Side Sports Bar & Grill, Country Corner, Pope’s Pizza, and Pizza Etc. There are also a handful of diners in Warren County.
“Poopy’s diner uses a lot of sausage,” Rahman noted.”
Rahman has ambitious goals to expand well beyond the local area. Her business plan, which she wrote with he help of Matt Hosek, a business advisor at the Small Business Development Corp. at the University at Albany, includes establishing national distribution and exporting to Canada.
Locally, she plans to strengthen wholesale connections with restaurants and grocery stores, modernize her facility to conform with USDA standards, expand retail sales and product offerings, and grow online sales by launching direct-to-consumer e-commerce with a focus on high-demand regions for Italian cuisine.
While the company’s tried-and-true recipes will still be available, new offerings will include leaner, lower sodium varieties; possibly plant-based options; and seasoning packs which are currently available online.
To provide retail sales, Rahman converted a small office into a space containing shelves holding seasoning packs. She plans to install a small glass-door refrigerator to sell sausages and possibly some cheeses. At first, this area will be open three days a week when the sausage is being made.
Currently, Rahman and her daughter, Alexa, comprise the entire staff. In addition to helping her mother make sausage, Alexa, who will start law school next year, is the company’s legal advisor and bookkeeper.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when she goes to school,” Rahman said. “She’s been awesome and I’m going to be lost when she leaves.”
In the not too distant future Rahman is going to have to hire a part-time employee that may turn into a full-time position. While part of the process is mechanized, there is a fair amount of manual labor involved. The knowledge of how to use butcher knives is paramount as well as the physical strength to lift a 58.2-pound container of ingredients over one’s head and put them into the hopper, where they come out of the grinder at the other end. It is then mixed by hand before being pushed through a shoot, put into a bucket and then into the stuffer for the final process of creating either link or bulk sausage that is put into bags.
“When my daughter and I put the mixture into the hopper we have to cut it in half to lift in up there,” Rahman confided.
Rahman’s mother, Cheryle, who had been the bookkeeper for Marc, wanted to close the business permanently when her husband died and at first Rahman agreed with her. But then she had what she calls “an epiphany” and decided she had to keep the business going.
“I wanted to honor my dad,” she said. “He did an amazing job of growing the business and having the customer base he had and it was just too hard for me to let it go.”
To start to process of rebranding the business she first contacted Greg Connors, president of Saratoga Economic Development Corporation. SEDC has a small business startup initiative and Connors introduced her to Hosek at UAlbany. Hosek met with her several times while he and his research librarians helped her put together her business plan.
“It’s an ongoing process,” Hosek said. “I’m sure we’ll have other meetings as she moves forward with her plan.”
They were able to show her that market analysts predict that the sausage market will grow substantially in the coming years with a focus on natural, healthier options. U.S. market revenue is estimated to reach $23.4 billion this year.
“When Parillo’s closed, it seemed quite traumatic for people who had liked them over the year’s,” Connors said. “I think the economic impact for that niche market will be significant.”
Rahman agrees. “My mother transferred the business to me and I want to blow it out of the park,” she said.
For more information about the offerings of Parillo’s Sausage go to https://parillosausage.com