Steve Polidori always liked “Ferris Bueller's Day Off,” so he doesn’t mind too much that everyone calls him the “Sausage King of Denver.”
“All my friends call me that too,” he joked. “Then I say Matthew Broderick's line: ‘Are you saying I'm not who I say I am when they call me the sausage king?’”
But jokes aside, Polidori did inherit a meaty legacy from his family: Polidori Sausage has been in business since the 1980s, and the business has roots in Denver that go back much further.
As cookout season takes hold in the city, he invited us to see — literally — how the sausage gets made.
The business’s local roots were planted a century ago.
Black-and-white photographs are some of the first things you see as you enter the company’s warehouse at Northeast Park Hill’s industrial edge on Dahlia Street.
Polidori is featured in one, from an old article by the Denver Catholic Register, showing him as a younger man. He wears a trimmed goatee and a pointed paper deli cap. Next to him is his grandfather, Louis, who opened the sausagemaking operation in 1982.
But the family business goes back even farther. Steve Polidori’s great-grandparents, Anna and Roco Polidori, opened a north Denver grocery store in 1925, a century ago this August. The little shop is the backdrop of a lot of Steve’s childhood memories.
“I remember walking in the back where the butcher was, where my grandfather was, and getting a ham sandwich made fresh right there,” said Polidori, whose goatee is greyer these days, “but not necessarily making the sausage when I was a kid.”
The shop was also where Anna, a Sicilian immigrant, first sold her family’s sausage recipe to the city. Her formula still underpins her great-grandson’s flagship product today.
Louis and his brother took over the family enterprise in 1945, but faced an uncertain future when the grocery store shuttered 37 years later. Polidori said retirement wasn’t in his grandfather’s vocabulary, so he started the sausage business.
“He figured, ‘I'm not a golfer, I can't play golf every day.’ And his hobby was working. He grew out of the depression era,” Polidori told us. “He was not ready to retire, so he started this business up and it grew into a thriving little hobby that became more than a hobby.”
The family is still making sausage all these years later, but with some upgrades.
Polidori bought his grandfather out of the family business in 2001, when it finally was time for Louis to retire. He hired his sister, Melodie Polidori Harris, soon after, and the siblings set their sights on growth.
Today, the business ships products to restaurants and grocery stores across the region. You can also find their dogs on sale at Coors Field and Ball Arena, where the business pays to be the “official sausage” of the Colorado Rockies and Avalanche.
“We're in about 24 states right now, looking to expand that and can go nationwide with it,” Polidori said.
The company’s new distribution company will bring the product to all 50 states, The Denver Post reported.
Past the showroom, and all the old photos, is a production floor where his employees churn out the product. Polidori said they produce about 4 million pounds of sausage each year.
His longtime facility manager, Tim Ryan, said they’re particular about the pork they use, which mostly comes from midwestern farms.
“We do a mixture of the trim and a picnic, which is the shoulder, [which] gets combined so we get the perfect fat-to-meat ratio,” he said. “There's a lot of companies that end up using the cheaper products. We do not do that. We try to stay to the best cuts we can get.”
That raw material is loaded into special machinery that blends it together, then mixes in spices and cranks out precisely measured links and patties.
Polidori said he’s interested in automating more of this process to help the business grow. But his marketing chief, Caroline Lahn, said there’s a fine line: They need to be efficient, but they also want to maintain a craft-made identity for their products.
“One of our mission statements around here is we're large enough to handle, but small enough to care,” she said.
Financial headwinds have impacted the operation, but Polidori says he’s bullish on pork.
The nation’s post-pandemic economy didn’t spare the business, he told us. Polidori has had to explain rising prices to customers as inflation has pushed up costs.
“Everything's gone up, and unfortunately, we passed it along to the consumer,” he said. “That's kind of how we have to stay in business, and everybody's seen it.”
His PR rep, Grace Markley, said President Donald Trump’s current tariff whirlwind hasn’t impacted the business so far.
Despite overall inflation, sausage and bacon prices have remained steadier than other segments of the nation’s food economy. Data from the USDA show retail beef prices rising faster than pork in recent decades.
Nobody likes a price hike, Polidori said, but he sees opportunity in that divergence.
“With the cost of steaks or beef going up, sausage has become somewhat of a center of the plate. It's more affordable. You can't go out and buy a tenderloin, but you can go out and buy sausage, and it's still the same amount of protein, more flavor,” he said.
And Polidori added he’s been trying to add even more flavor, to attract more customers. Cheese, he told us, is in right now.
“Anything with cheese,” he said. “We are just bringing out a jalapeño cheddar brat. We haven't really brought it to market yet, but that'll be at Coors Field.”
The business and the product have grown, changed and weathered more economic downturns than this. His grandfather, and great-grandmother, he added, would be floored to see the business today.
“They would be overwhelmed at what we've done with it. I think they'd be very proud,” he said. “I don't think they could fathom it, to tell you the honest truth.”
