Meat + Poultry - February 2006 - 23

SMARTER
SAUSAGE PROCESSING
back of the building and sold out of a
retail meat case in its front.
The Heinles, accustomed to
$750,000 in annual sales before the
road construction began, watched
their store's sales plummet by 60 percent during the construction. A year
after the road reopened, the business
has still not recovered.
"We were hoping to at least break
$300,000 in sales (in 2005)," Norm
says. "But we didn't."
Norm is still shocked about the setback. Even when the road construction began, he didn't think it would
hurt the business like it did. The Sausage Shoppe had been a formidable
operation for many years. People
from throughout Greater Cleveland
came to the store to purchase products made from Old World recipes.
"It has really been a good business," says Norm, who has owned
The Sausage Shoppe for more than
30 years. "But I had it in my thick
skull that (the road construction)
wasn't going to affect it."
The 62-year-old has worked at The
Sausage Shoppe since he was 13.
Norm washed pots and pans in the
beginning, but eventually learned
the art of sausage making. He took
over the business in 1974 from German immigrants, Hans Kirchberger
and Theo Johanni, who founded the
company in 1934. Needless to say,
the past few years have been the most
challenging for Norm, who holds a
bachelor's degree in business from
John Carroll Univ. in Cleveland.
But Norm and Carol, together with
their children Allen and Renee who
also work for the family business, don't
plan on giving up. They are confident
they can regain much of the lost business. But in doing so they must employ
some new marketing initiatives.
"We're not going to throw in the towel," Norm says.
A good sign
Even before business began slipping,
Norm and Carol hadn't been dreaming
of retiring, but they had been hoping
24

MEAT&POULTRY

February 2006

to cut back their work hours and living a little easier. For now, however,
they'll continue working at a full-speed
to improve the business and pay back
a $50,000 loan they took out to keep
the business afloat during the road construction.
"I wasn't thinking at age 62 that I
would have to take out a 10-year loan,"
Norm says.
It's easy for the Heinles to second
guess themselves for not reacting more
swiftly to the hard times. Some customers wondered why the Heinles didn't

"We need to keep
hammering home the
same message-that
our products are oldfashioned, made by
hand and have been
the same recipe for
more than 60 years."
open a temporary satellite store in a
nearby mall to sustain the business.
"We might have if we would have
known the construction was going to
last so long," Carol says.
More than a year after construction
began the Heinles realized how much
of a toll it was taking on the business.
"Like anybody in the meat business,
December is usually a good month for
us," Norm says, noting The Sausage
Shoppe does about 25 percent of its

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annual sales that month.
But sales were not good in December
2003, and the Heinles knew they had to
do something to stop the financial bleeding. "We were going $1,500 a week into
the hole," Norm says. So they took out
the loan to help pay the bills. Several
months later, they also cut the staff from
four to two full-time employees.
This was new and uncomfortable
territory to the Heinles. They never
had to worry about money before.
They never hesitated to pump money
back into the business by buying new
equipment to improve operations.
They didn't think twice about spending money to experiment with new
products or to travel to industry conferences and trade shows.
Things began changing for the
worst when the road was torn up,
but other factors combined to hurt
their business. The economy around
Cleveland had been stagnant and
many jobs have been lost the past
few years. The Sausage Shoppe lost
some of its customer base because
local plants and businesses closed.
People's shopping and eating habits have also hurt the business, Carol
says. Younger consumers prefer onestop shopping and would rather purchase all of their groceries at supermarkets.
The neighborhood around The Sausage Shoppe is also getting rundown.
Norm suspects that has had a negative effect on the sales too.
Despite all the negatives, there
are signs business is improving. All
Norm and Carol Heinle wanted for
Christmas this past holiday season
was a good month of business in December. They got it. "It was the first
good time since the road reopened,"
Norm says.
The spur in business gives the Heinles to hope for better days. But that
sales upturn didn't just happen-the
Heinles help create it.
Renee Close, the Heinles' daughter
and The Sausage Shoppe's marketing
director, expects business to improve
even more. With the road reopened

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Meat + Poultry - February 2006

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