The Decision That Turned Johnsonville Into America’s Top Sausage Brand

On this episode of Our American Stories, Johnsonville Sausage grew into the best-selling sausage brand in the United States, but the company’s success did not come from product alone. It also came from a culture that placed unusual trust in its employees.

When a Johnsonville plant in Watertown, Wisconsin burned down, the company faced a difficult choice about what to do with the workers who suddenly had no place to work. Instead of layoffs, Johnsonville’s leadership made an unexpected decision.

Ralph Stayer, former CEO and board chairman of Johnsonville Sausage, shares the story of that moment and how a commitment to doing the right thing helped shape the company’s culture and long-term success.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we can continue with our American stories. And now
it's time for our Do the Right Thing series about
ethical dilemmas that's sponsored by The Daniels Fun and our
own Alex Cortez brings us this latest edition.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ralph Stayer is the founder of Johnsonville's Sausage. Back around
nineteen eighty, Johnsonville was growing twenty percent a year and
Ralph was excited. But no one else was. And Ralph
realized that he was the problem. He had made it
all about him, with every employee reporting to him, all
one hundred and fifty of them. Ralph decided to do

(00:46):
a one eighty and make it all about them, empowering
what they now call each other team members more radically
than perhaps any other company. Ralph took himself out of
almost everything. The Johnsonville team members decide whom they want
to hire, fire, and work with. They created the system
for the profit sharing pool that's around thirty percent of
all profits, and together they created the number one sausage

(01:10):
brand in America. Ralph couldn't be more proud of the
team and the ethical decisions that they've made.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
One day, I got a phone call that a plant
and watertown Wisconsin burned out. It was destroyed. So we
needed to move as quickly as possible to get that
new plant up because twenty five percent of our total
production was coming out of that plant. A great aside
that other people and other plants stepped up. The people

(01:41):
stepped up and increased production and worked work extra shifts
weekends for almost a year to cover I mean, I
can't say enough about people's attitudes. They just did it,
no question. That was a ton, no carping or anything else.

(02:03):
But so we're looking at this plant and these people
who don't have work, no plant, no work, And so
I'm sitting in Florida and they called me up and said,
you know, our leadership team calls them and said, you know, Ralph,
we decided that we're going to keep everybody on. We're

(02:23):
gonna pay everybody. There's forty hours a week even though
there's no work. All we're going to ask of them
is that they spend x amount of time developing new
skills in any technical school or whatever and well, and
we will fund the cost. So they'll do that community service.

(02:45):
They cleaned up the airport, they did all kinds of
community service. So as long as you're doing those things
and are actually doing something, not sitting around doing nothing.
We're paying your salary. We did it for a whole year.
Now a lot of people would say, oh crazy, wow. Yeah. However,

(03:06):
these are very talented people, and we have invested a
ton of money in them. We've been investing in these
people all these years. You know, my mother, years and
years ago, we didn't initially didn't understand where I was going,
what I was doing, where we were going, what we
were doing better statement, because there are a lot of

(03:28):
us that build the Johnson a way. But she said, well,
what if you invest You're investing all this money in
these people. What if they learned all listen, they quit
and go somewhere else. I said, Mom, what if we
don't invest all this money in they stay? What's worse?

(03:50):
Oh I never thought of that, And so I have
an investment in most people is incredible. There's incredible people,
incredible talent. We had a building plant there, and so
if we didn't do it, we'd lost a whole bunch
of them and the startup would have been horrendous. The

(04:13):
startup of the new plant would have been horrendous, training
new people, etc. Cetera, trying to find them and all that. So, yeah,
the first response was we're doing it because it's the
right thing to do. On the other hand, when you
look back on it, and we look back and say, heck,
we got that plant going in ten months. God provided
a building for us that we didn't even know existed.

(04:34):
We found that, like right now, we were able to
move in and redo it and all that. And the
day we started up, we went just like gangbusters. So
it's an ethical dilemma, but it's the right thing to do.
But the beauty of it is that decision was made.
No one called me. They did it. They made that call,

(04:57):
they informed me. They didn't call it ask for permission.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Even though they were spending tens of millions of dollars.
The Johnsonville team members and water Talent did over ten
thousand hours of community service during this year, and their
ranks even grew from one hundred and twenty team members
before the fire to one hundred and fifty five in
the new plant. And besides plants, Johnsonville has a pretty
fun asset that Ralph is about to introduce you to.

(05:26):
But like every asset in our life, there's constant ethical
dilemmas about how to best use them, and you're about
to hear how the Johnsonville team members keep the ethical
principle of respect front and center, which can lead to
an extremely viable business.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
We have these big taste grills that run all over
the country right with our product on them, and they
go to big events and we expose people to Johnsonvile
brotz in mine. It's hard for me to imagine, but
there are people actually out there in the world that
haven't tasted that are broads yet. So anyway, Hurricane Countrine hit.

(06:03):
Next thing I know this video of our big taste
grill down there feeding the relief workers the next day
or two days later whatever, feeding the relief workers. How
did that happen? Well, people decided that they was scheduled
for events or whatever somewhere center people made a decision.

(06:25):
They sent it down there to feed the relief workers
and the people who were homeless, and obviously there's no power,
no place to eat, So we fed thousands and thousands
of people. Then we did the same thing in Texas
Harvey and then Sandy, and people just do it because

(06:46):
it's the right thing to do in our company and
then there's a story about when the tornado hit Chopplin,
and Walmart's the biggest customer, and I've been invited down

(07:09):
a couple of times to speak at their Saturday morning
meetings about partnerships and explaining how we see it between
supplier and customer relationships and the value of partnering. Then
it's a two way street. If you're going to beat
people up all the time, then we're going to take
our resources and put it someplace else where we get
a better return. But you folks have been so great

(07:31):
that you work with us, you get your best customer,
you get our best number one call on everything. Okay,
but that's how it works. So we finished this whole time.
We showed the results of the new products and stuff.
It's a hockey stick. It's a hockey stick of how
much we've sold to them, how much they've sold because

(07:52):
of our relationship. And afterwards, this fellow stays up. He said,
you know, I hear all that, and that's really good,
But I want to tell you something about this company.
I was in Joppla, Missouri, the day after the tornado,
and in the parking lot of the I'm getting chills again.

(08:14):
I'm getting chills again just thinking about this. And in
the parking lot of our Walmart, which was totally destroyed,
there was the Johnsonville Big Taste Girl cooking sausage, cooking
food for all the relief workers, for all the people.
They were there doing that. I don't know, we didn't
have any other vendors doing that, but there was a

(08:34):
Johnsonville Girl serving everybody. And that's what I call a
great company. And that's me. I feel pretty good right
now because he's not only telling here, he's telling it
all over the world because that's broadcast all over the world.

(08:55):
And now we knew business in Walmart's pretty much all
over the world anyway. There it is. So if you
live your life the right way, these things happened this
bat that doesn't cost money sometimes, yeah, but overall overall,

(09:16):
the blessings are unbelievable. But again, I didn't tell anybody
to go to Choplin. There's no phone call from the
CEO go to Choplin. The people who are managing that
Bake Taste Girl went to Chopolet because they knew it
was the right thing to do, made all their ages,

(09:38):
got all the product. Whatever the buzz. Whatever it took,
they were there, passing it on, giving it away, giving
it away.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
And a special thanks to Alex and to Joey Cortes
for the work they did on this piece, and a
special thanks to Ralph Stare for telling story and as
always are Do the Right Thing series is brought to
us by the great folks at the Daniels Fund. To
learn about bringing their ethics programs to your school, business, police, department, church,

(10:12):
go to Danielsfund dot org. That's Danielsfund dot org and
they have eight principles in their ethics initiative that they
really drill down on. Two of the principles were at
play here. One was viability and that's creating long term
value for all relevant stakeholders. And my goodness, that was

(10:32):
done here by keeping those employees in the mix ready
to go when that plant was rebuilt. Our Do the
Right Thing series, this time with Ralph Stare of Johnsonville
Sausage here on our American Stories