Photography by Shawn LaChapelle
Marisa Rahman knows how the sausage gets made.
As a child, the Saratogian learned the ins and outs of turning pork into sausage and selling it to customers from her father, Marc Parillo. For decades, the elder Parillo ran Parillo Sausage Co., a company his father started in 1951, out of a plain white building just a few blocks away from
Broadway with his wife, Cheryle.
“I started working here when I was about 8 or 9, making boxes, bags, putting labels on things, learning how to make sausage,” Rahman says. “I learned the business at a really young age. When I got into my teens, I would help my dad run it.”
Though Rahman, now 55, learned the trade as a kid, taking over the family biz wasn’t exactly part of the plan—that is, until recently. When her father died of cancer in early 2024, she sought to sell the company. She spoke with potential buyers, but nothing panned out. Then, early one summer morning, she had a revelation.
“I said, ‘Why don’t I take this business over?’”
That “aha” moment was sparked in part by her father’s former customers, some of whom she met in the process of selling bags of the company’s sausage seasoning to generate income for her mother. People noticed, and began asking whether she’d be selling sausages too. Parillo’s Sausage. began making sausage again in November, and Rahman is currently in the process of reconnecting with old customers and finding new ones.
And the customers are certainly out there. Demand for her father’s provisions—ground pork, breakfast sausage, sweet and hot Italian sausage—had always been strong. In the final years of his life, he produced 3,000 pounds of sausage per week, and was forced to turn customers away.
Now, following her revelation, Rahman doesn’t just want to bring the company back—she wants to bring it to the next level. Among other things, she hopes to find a distributor to take her product national, sell special holiday sausage and build a café. “Every year,” she says, “we can strive for something new.”
But there’s one thing that isn’t changing anytime soon. With Rahman at the helm and her 22-year-old daughter, Alexa, serving as the company’s chief operating officer, Parillo’s Sausage remains a family-run business, through and through.