Owned and operated by an Italian American family, Martin’s Specialty Sausage captures the energy of what it means to be part of the melting pot that is the United States. The Giunta family has passed down its butchering skills and Italian roots through generations. Established in 1986, Martin’s Specialty Sausage has grown to represent a vibrant display of cultures through its unique sausage offerings and regionally sourced ingredients.

With its headquarters in Southern New Jersey, the company operates out of a 22,000-square-foot manufacturing facility but ships its products to a second location in Philadelphia and to local retailers as well as foodservice distributors. Its full-service butcher shop in Philadelphia is part of Center City’s Reading Terminal Market — a historic landmark that preserves its original purpose with over 80 merchants selling local produce, fresh eggs, milk, meat, poultry, seafood, handmade crafts, jewelry and clothing.

Before Martin’s Specialty Sausage was established, the Giunta family operated a meat business in Philadelphia’s Italian market in 1912. The market was a novelty for its era — a hub for food and goods in a time when those resources simply couldn’t be found at a nearby supermarket. People would seek out the market on 9th Street for items like cheeses, fish, meats and produce. The Giunta family held an essential spot on that street, offering customers highly sought after protein.

It wasn’t until several decades later that Martin Giunta, current co-owner of Martin’s Specialty Sausage, set out to extend the legacy that his grandfather and father built on 9th Street by embarking on an entrepreneurial adventure of his own. Taking the skills of the trade along with his knack for culinary innovation and keen interest in sausage, Giunta opened up Martin’s Specialty Sausage.

Currently, Giunta and his wife Kim own the company and operate it with the help of their daughter, Gabrielle Giunta, and 65 to 70 other employees.

The business is in Gabrielle’s blood. Not only does she come from a long line of butchers on her dad’s side, but her mother, Kim, also has a history in the meat industry. Kim’s father operated a facility that produced high-end quality meat cuts for foodservice.

Although the company relocated its headquarters to New Jersey over 20 years ago, Martin's Specialty Sausage continues to operate a full-service butcher shop in Philadelphia's historic Reading Terminal Market. (Source: Martin's Specialty Sausage)

Endless combinations

Martin’s Specialty Sausage lists over 60 different flavors of sausage on its website using several kinds of protein, including classics like pork, beef and chicken as well as less common options like turkey, veal and lamb. Even with such a vast portfolio, the company continues to innovate to align with the seasons and the latest trends, offering custom recipe sausages when needed.

“We focus around seasonality,” Gabrielle said. “We have something for each part of the year, whether it’s for foodservice or retail customers — because we do sell both. We also have staples you can always come home to. Like if you just want traditional Italian sausage or breakfast sausage, we carry those as well.”

For Martin’s Specialty Sausage, seasonality relates to both what ingredients are available that time of year and which products might be desired for upcoming holidays. For example, if it’s St. Patrick’s Day, they might feature an Irish-style banger sausage; for Easter, a Polish kielbasa with garlic; and around Christmastime, a liver sausage.

It was these diversions into specialty styles for specific customer groups that helped bolster Martin’s Specialty Sausage’s business. Martin Giunta enjoyed trying out different ingredients to enhance the taste of a product and experimenting with new styles of sausage. Top chefs began to take notice and would seek him out to develop a new product for their own operations.

“For us, we’re most comfortable with Italian because that’s the roots that we have and what we grew up with, but then having customers approach us — and that all started in the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia — having the exposure to all these top chefs in the area was great,” Gabrielle said, describing how the company began to expand to include types of sausage outside of its original Italian sausage. Some of those flavors include a South African-style boerewors, Portuguese-style linguica, German-style bratwurst and Spanish-style chorizo, among others.

“We’ll try and do as much research as we can to stay true to what the general consensus of that region would be and then take our best shot at matching that,” Gabrielle said. “As far as ingredients, we will go out of our way to try and source ingredients to match what the actual recipe calls for. For example, with our Italian sausage with provolone cheese and parsley, we want to make sure we use only our imported provolone that actually carries flavor from when the customer is going to cook it and heat it and reheat it that you’re really going to be able to taste a sharp provolone cheese. We will go the extra mile to source the proper ingredients so that you’re tasting what the recipe says it is.”

Through ongoing collaborations with chefs on new recipes, Martin’s Specialty Sausage quickly grew in size, leading to the company’s opening of a USDA-inspected processing plant in Philadelphia in 1989. After continued success, the company branched out further in 2002, moving to New Jersey to build a new state-of-the-art facility with plenty of technology-rich equipment supplied by Risco, based in South Easton, Mass.

Martin's Specialty Sausage's Kielbasa is a Polish style recipe made with fresh garlic. (Source: Martin's Specialty Sausage)

Ingredient integrity

Martin’s Specialty Sausage recognizes that a high quality product first begins with high quality ingredients. In line with these values, the company only uses fresh raw materials, never frozen.

“That becomes a little bit challenging at times because we don’t have the buying power of some of the larger companies, so we can just shop around in our local area with different distributors who can get us fresh pork, fresh turkey and chicken,” Gabrielle explained, adding, “In time, it’s been a lot harder to buy fresh raw material overall. A lot of people want to sell you frozen.”

Other criteria the company looks for when sourcing meat and poultry is that the producer meets the Global Food Safety Initiative standards and that they have the proper documentation for being antibiotic-free and all-natural.

Martin’s Specialty Sausage places a lot of stock into where its ingredients come from and knows its customers do as well. The company has an antibiotic-free, all-natural product line and just recently started a certified-organic line. The latter includes fully cooked, ready-to-eat organic chicken breakfast sausages — a chicken and savory flavor as well as chicken and apple. In the future, the company plans to expand the line into the dinner category.

More product innovations are in the works at Martin’s Specialty Sausage, including a hot honey and garlic pork sausage that is currently in the R&D stage. New flavors can take anywhere from four months to two years, Gabrielle noted. No matter how long it takes, one thing remains certain: There will be no shortage of sausage options at Martin’s Specialty Sausage.