Two partners, local restaurants and a name that grew to include the state.

Old Wisconsin is an American brand of summer sausage and meat snack sticks, made in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, and owned by the Illinois meat processor Carl Buddig and Co. Its name is the newer half of an older one. The Business News, a regional business paper in northeast Wisconsin, reported on 9 September 2022, in an article marking the company’s seventy-fifth year, that it got its start in 1947 as a family butcher shop that sold meat to local restaurants and grocery stores. The partners were Frank Thielmann and William Stolzman, and the business was then known by Thielmann’s name.

The National Provisioner, the meat-industry trade magazine, also placed the company’s beginnings in Sheboygan in 1947 in its own anniversary feature of 30 September 2022. The company tells the same story on its website. It says Old Wisconsin began as Thielmann’s, a small sausage shop owned and operated by the two partners, and that it still uses many of their sausage recipes.

Growth brought a building and a new name. Steve Harrison, the company’s vice president and general manager, told The Business News that rising demand led it to open a plant in 1953 and to change its name shortly afterwards to Thielmann’s Old Wisconsin Sausage Company. The company’s website gives the same sequence. The original shop building survives: a photograph caption in The Business News says the old Thielmann’s building now serves as an Old Wisconsin retail store.

The partnership did not last. The Business News reported that a difference of opinion eventually led Thielmann and Stolzman to part ways. The next step in the company’s growth came in the 1970s. Harrison told the paper that in 1976 Stolzman purchased the Rammer Sausage Company in Sheboygan. The company’s website describes the 1976 purchase of Sheboygan-based Rammer Sausage Company as its own.

Carl Buddig and Co., Fat Freddie and a shift to snacks.

The present owner arrived at the start of the 1980s. The Business News reported in September 2022 that in 1981 Carl Buddig and Co., a family-owned meat-processing company headquartered in Illinois, purchased the company and changed its name to Old Wisconsin Sausage Company, dropping the Thielmann name. The National Provisioner also dated the Buddig purchase and the change of name to 1981, calling it a defining moment in the company’s growth. Carl Buddig and Co. has owned Old Wisconsin since 1981. The magazine’s 2022 feature quoted Bob Buddig, chief executive of Carl Buddig and Co., which it said owns Old Wisconsin.

The same purchase set the direction of the product range. Harrison told The Business News that at the same time the Buddig family acquired the Fat Freddie brand, which had snack sausages as a proprietary product, and that Old Wisconsin expanded that line. He said the company found snack sausage more affordable to produce than traditional ethnic sausage and easier to ship, because it needed less refrigeration. The company says it opened a new plant in 1996, and The Business News reported that in 2016 it moved its distribution and packaging operation from its former site on Union Avenue to a new facility in Sheboygan.

Bob Buddig described the business as homegrown. “There’s not a single Buddig employee up at Old Wisconsin,” he told The National Provisioner. “They built it.” He placed it among the family-owned employers of the Sheboygan area, naming the Kohler Co., Johnsonville and Sargento, and said the Old Wisconsin and Carl Buddig lines work together with retail buyers.

The 2022 feature also set out what the brand does not make. “One thing we do not do is jerky,” Bob Buddig told the magazine. “That sets us apart, and we really focus just on the meat stick side of things. It really goes back to our heritage from the old traditional sausage made up in Wisconsin, up in Sheboygan.” He said the company had spent several years focusing on the snack side of the business, with meat sticks, deli bites and snack bites, and that its foodservice team had placed products with airlines. At the time it was relaunching a natural cut meat-and-cheese combination pack in single-serve trays in parts of the country, he said.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell chips, pretzels, jerky and cookies, and snack brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a petrol-station counter to a supermarket aisle.

A snack brand’s identity is usually carried less by any single product than by a bag, a pack and a name, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its baking or frying to another plant, or grown far beyond the town where it started. A chip bag, a jerky pack or a cookie package sits on a crowded shelf, and each guide looks at the colours, lettering and characters a brand uses there. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its snacks are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a partner’s surname to the name of the state, and a brand vocabulary built on smoke.

The brand name tells its own history. The business began under a founder’s surname, as Thielmann’s, added the words “Old Wisconsin” after its 1953 plant opened, and kept those words alone once Carl Buddig and Co. took over in 1981, according to The Business News. A partner’s surname gave way to the name of a state.

The company’s current website, as viewed in October 2026, builds on that regional claim. Its home page carries the line “Made in Wisconsin Enjoyed Everywhere”, and the company describes itself as a Wisconsin company whose sausage-making goes hand in hand with a love of the outdoors. The products are grouped by occasion: snacks on the go, summer sausage at home and sausages for the grill. The snack range is sold under names such as Snack Sticks, Snack Bites, Smoke Stacks and Yumbo, and a line called Natural Cut sits alongside them, presented under the phrase “Better Flavor, Naturally”.

Smoke is the brand’s recurring word. The company says it smokes its meats slowly over real hardwood fires. Its ambassador programme for fans is called “Join the Smokehouse”, and a promotional road trip, the Taste Tour, was described on the site as taking the smokehouse on the road. A seasonal announcement on the site also told readers that, after requests from its home state to “Bring Back the Smokehouse Wiener”, the company had returned its natural-casing wieners for the summer. The website also invites visitors to see the brand’s new packaging, which it calls a new look.

The company’s own story ties the brand to a single place. It says Sheboygan’s German heritage and a tradition of sausage making form the foundation the brand is built on, and the original Thielmann’s building now serves as an Old Wisconsin retail store. Bob Buddig made the same point to The National Provisioner in 2022, tracing the focus on meat sticks back to traditional Sheboygan sausage.

For a design guide, Old Wisconsin shows how a regional name and a consistent vocabulary of smoke, hardwood and the outdoors can carry a snack brand from a butcher’s counter to convenience shelves. Compare it with Johnsonville, another Sheboygan-area sausage maker, and Slim Jim, a meat-stick brand with a very different, louder voice. For this guide we use smokehouse red, cheddar gold, casing cream and Lake Michigan blue with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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