Meat+Poultry - February 2018 - 40

COVER STORY

The sausage served
at Southside's two
restaurants is available
at a growing number of
retail outlets, including
HEB stores in Texas and
Walmart. The mainstay
sausage is all-beef, but
five other flavor profiles
were recently rolled out.

MEAT+ POULTRY | 02.18 | www.meatpoultry.com

brisket, ribs and everything else we serve but
to us sausage is center of the plate."
One of the company's signature t-shirts
reads: "We've got sausage and things that go
good with sausage."
"When you're in central Texas and you say
'sausage,' it means beef sausage," he says.

MAINTAINING TRADITION
As for the Southside recipe, Bracewell says
simple is the secret ingredient. "We just say
it's a Texas barbecue sausage," he says. "It's
not very highly engineered, made fresh daily
and we smoke it the same day or the next day
in the restaurant." With two locations in the
region, he says the top-selling menu item is
easily sausage. "About 50 cents of every dollar
we sell is sausage."
Today's retail offerings have flip-flopped
from the days when Bracewell first joined,
with over 95 percent of products sold being
smoked and less than 5 percent fresh. The
shift reflects the changing buying patterns of
today's consumers as well as the popularity
of Southside's online offerings, which is
made up almost entirely of fully cooked
items and available through its website as
well as through retail giant, Neiman Marcus
and on Amazon. Manufacturing and order
fulfillment and shipping is done in-house and
Bracewell says it has become a viable part of
the company's business. Retail distribution
has grown to Walmart stores in five states and
central and north Texas-based HEB stores.
Sysco distributes to foodservice customers
that ship to destinations including Legoland
in San Diego, MOJO BBQ restaurants in
Florida and more restaurants up the East
Coast. Accentuating shelf life with case-ready
packaging helped facilitate the increased
distribution.
In 2007, the company celebrated its 125th
anniversary by rolling out five new flavors
of sausage, including four that were either
pork blends or all pork. Prior to that, "we had
only sold one flavor and it was either fresh or
smoked," and all of it was beef. Diversifying
meant adding some pork into the offerings, but
Texans are all about the beef.
"We sell some pork sausage," Bracewell
says, "but the reality is we do business in Texas
and in Texas people eat beef. Beef sausage is
king around here."

Southside Market and Barbeque Inc.

40

grandpa on Monday afternoons and picking
up cattle and calves that we would slaughter
on Tuesday morning and that would be the
meat for our butcher shop for that week. But
predominantly the sausage came from boxed
meat," he says.
When the operations moved to the former
bank building location, Southside transitioned
to all boxed beef from feedlot cattle to supply
the butcher shop. At that point the company
cut back to only doing custom slaughtering
for local customers. "In August of 2002, I shut
down the slaughter plant," he says, which
was a tough decision for all three generations
of operators. Bracewell's logic was: "We've
got to concentrate on what we do really well
and that's making sausage and barbecue and
I'd rather concentrate my efforts on making
sausage and barbecue."
In the early days, Bracewell considered the
family business to be a butcher shop that sold
barbecue on the side. When his grandfather
became involved in 1968, the locally popular
sausage became regionally popular and that
spawned distribution to a wider swath of
customers. "That's when we became more of a
sausage business," he says.
"Nowadays, on the retail side I tell people
we used to be a meat market that sold
barbecue on the side. Now I tell them we're a
barbecue joint that sells fresh meat on the side
and we've continued to grow our distribution
business of sausage.
"For us, even in the restaurant, it's all about
sausage," Bracewell says. "We're proud of our
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Meat+Poultry - February 2018

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