Two couples, a store with living quarters and a small smokehouse.

Johnsonville is a privately owned American sausage company headquartered at Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. It takes its name from Johnsonville, an unincorporated village in Sheboygan County, where the business began in 1945. The company says the founders named the shop after their hometown.

Who founded it depends on the source. The company’s own history names Ralph F. Stayer and his wife Alice, who opened a butcher shop in 1945. The Wisconsin Meat Industry Hall of Fame, run by the animal sciences department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which inducted Ralph F. and Alice Stayer in 2000, gives a fuller picture: it says the Stayers joined Carl and Anna Hirsch to found Johnsonville Sausage in the village. English Wikipedia also lists Carl Hirsch among the founders.

The Hall of Fame describes the first premises in detail. There was a store, living quarters for the two families, a sausage kitchen, a small smokehouse and a separate shed for slaughtering. The Stayer and Hirsch partnership did well, the citation says, until it was dissolved after Carl Hirsch died, and the business then continued as a Stayer family company.

The road to the shop was not direct. The Hall of Fame says Alice, born Alice Brinkman, grew up in Ahmeek, Michigan, and married Ralph F. Stayer, known as “R.F.,” in 1938. The couple, it says, first tried to buy a small empty shop in Milwaukee to turn into a flower shop, and that offer fell through. Johnsonville’s spokesperson Stephanie Dlugopolski told the local station Seehafer News in December 2020 that the Stayers had always wanted their own business, that a flower shop had not worked out, and that someone pointed them to a butcher shop, which they took on without butchering experience.

The company also traces its sausage to a family recipe. Johnsonville says the sausage made in the Stayers’ shop came from an old family recipe handed down from nineteenth-century Austria. Dlugopolski told Seehafer News that the Stayers noticed customers buying more bratwurst and less ground beef, and that they chose to make their bratwurst from premium cuts of pork rather than trimmings. The Hall of Fame says R.F. concentrated on making sausage while Alice ran the office.

Trucks across Wisconsin, a son in charge and a second plant.

The company grew outward from Sheboygan County in stages. Johnsonville says that during the 1950s the Stayers expanded into nearby communities to meet demand, and that in 1970 its trucks began delivering sausage to stores throughout Wisconsin.

The next generation took over at the end of the decade. The company says Ralph C. Stayer, son of Ralph F. and Alice, became president in 1978 and began selling Johnsonville products outside Wisconsin. At the same time, it says, a second plant was built and the company began running television commercials. In the mid-1980s, according to the company, it set up a direct sales force. The Hall of Fame names both Ralph C. and his sister Launa among the family members who built the business with their parents.

Ralph C. Stayer wrote about running the company in the Harvard Business Review. In an article published in November 1990 under the title “How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead,” he said that in 1980 he was head of a successful family business, Johnsonville Sausage, that was in great shape and yet needed radical change. The magazine identified him as chief executive of Johnsonville Foods, Inc., of Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

That idea of shared ownership of the work survives in the company’s own vocabulary. Johnsonville says it calls its employees “members,” and that each member takes ownership of product quality. The company remains privately owned, and English Wikipedia names Johnsonville, LLC as the company and lists it as private.

Production has spread beyond the original village. The Hall of Fame said in its 2000 citation that much of the company’s slaughtering was done at a plant in Watertown, Wisconsin, and that the Stayers had helped popularise fresh bratwurst across the United States, which in turn widened the market for bratwurst from other Wisconsin meat processors. Johnsonville also runs a retail store, the Johnsonville Marketplace, opposite its headquarters in Sheboygan Falls; Dlugopolski told Seehafer News in 2020 that it was the one place in the United States where every sausage the company sells in the country could be bought.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell hot dogs, sausages, sliced deli meats and breakfast meats, foods that are bought chilled or frozen and are often chosen quickly from a long refrigerated case. Packaging in this category has to work at a glance: a name, a colour and a picture of the food have to be legible through clear film or on a small carton, under bright supermarket lighting, next to many similar packs.

That is why identity in this part of the grocery trade tends to rest on a few repeated signals rather than on a single container. A wordmark, a founder’s name, a slogan, a mascot or a jingle can travel across packs, advertising and sponsorships, while the pack itself changes size and format many times over the decades.

The companies behind these names have often changed hands, merged their factories or moved production, so each guide asks plain questions: who started the brand, who owns it now, where its meat is processed and how its look has been presented. Each separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

Big Taste, a family recipe and a logo on a cornhole board.

Johnsonville’s product range is built around the grill. English Wikipedia lists its sausages as including brats, grillers, Italian sausage, smoked-cooked links, breakfast sausage in fresh and fully cooked forms, chicken sausage, meatballs and summer sausage. The company’s own product lines, as it lists them, are brats, Italian, smoked, breakfast and snack.

The brand’s language has a repeated phrase. Johnsonville’s history page describes the family recipe as becoming known as the sausage with the “Big Taste”, setting the words in capitals, and the same page talks about the “Big Flavor” its members aim to deliver. The phrase turns up again in the description of the 1970 delivery trucks carrying the Big Taste of Johnsonville to Wisconsin stores.

Sport has given the logo a stage. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in September 2022 that Johnsonville had partnered with the American Cornhole League since 2017, and that the deal came together in a hurry after the league’s commissioner, Stacey Moore, sent a LinkedIn message saying ESPN would broadcast the league within ten days and that it had no sponsors. Jamie Schmelzer, Johnsonville’s director of strategic growth, told the paper that cornhole is played where people eat the company’s products, at backyard barbecues and tailgates, and that a broadcast cannot avoid showing the logo when the logo is on the board. The paper said the company’s logos were front and centre at the league’s “SuperHole” pro-am in South Carolina in August 2022, shown on ESPN2.

The same report said Johnsonville had made an advertisement spoofing the Budweiser frogs with a Wisconsin twist, featuring the former NFL receiver Chad Ochocinco and the softball player Jennie Finch, and that it ran qualifying tournaments at its own sausage-making sites.

For a design guide, Johnsonville shows how a village name, a family recipe and a single two-word phrase can carry a sausage maker from one shop to national shelves without a change of owner. Compare it with Hillshire Farm, another Wisconsin sausage that began with a butcher in a small town, and Oscar Mayer, the hot dog and lunchmeat brand. For this guide we use lakeshore navy, grill red, mustard and bun white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Johnsonville’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.