There is no doubt that Chicago still is very much a meat-processing town, as dozens of companies make their home in the Windy City. Those processors carry on a tradition that dates back to the famed Chicago Union Stock Yards, where thousands of workers helped to make the city the center for meat processing in America.
Unfortunately, there are relatively few companies left in Chicago that can date back to the Stock Yards era, but Makowski’s Real Sausage continues to succeed by blending time-tested tastes with contemporary thinking. The Makowski family has run the business since the late 1920s, and while the company’s name may have gone through some alterations, much of its product catalog has remained unchanged.
“We’ve kept the same product line, the same quality since we’ve been in business,” says Nicole Makowski, who has been president of the company since 2002, when she purchased the business from her father and uncle. She and her sister Danielle represent the fourth generation of the family in the business.
The company no longer produces some of the more traditional forms of sausage that were popular in the 1930s and ‘40s, such as blood sausage, but it still makes mainstays like hot dogs, Polish sausages and bratwursts, both for the foodservice and retail industries. Under Nicole Makowski’s leadership, the company has become certified to produce organic sausages, and it has greatly expanded its co-packing business.
“My parents were very supportive about the changes I wanted to make,” she recalls. “[My] great-grandfather would have never imagined we’d be making organic chicken sausages, but [my parents] let us run how we felt best for the business, which made it very comfortable.”