Uncle Charley’s Sausage once had about 60 employees at its Parks Township processing, packing and shipping facility.
Now, it has one — an affable, mustached maintenance supervisor named Randy Braden. A veteran of the food manufacturing business, he came on about 2½years ago after the soup cannery in Pittsburgh’s North Side where he worked closed.
He’s been tasked with unwinding the company’s presence at its 16,600-square-foot former headquarters, located in the Parks Bend Farms Industrial Park, after its owners quietly moved operations to New Haven, Conn., in November. The move went so under the radar, he still gets calls from food safety inspectors. Social media chatter has been practically nonexistent.
On Monday, Braden’s main job was to accompany representatives of industrial asset firm Rabin Worldwide as they tagged items for an April 1 online auction. There’s an estimated $300,000 worth of machines inside, much of it used to grind, chop and form products for what might be Western Pennsylvania’s most recognizable sausage brand.
Braden had few details about why owners Village Gourmet severed Uncle Charley’s from its Alle-Kiski Valley roots.
“They said they were losing money,” he said.
In an email to TribLive, Village Gourmet CEO David Kemp described the move as “a strategic consolidation with another sausage plant.” Longhini, which also falls under the New York-based family of speciality meat labels, is based in New Haven.
Despite the change, he added, “We aim to maintain distribution as widely as possible.”
The company’s website claims to have a 40% share of the sausage market in Western Pennsylvania and a significant presence in the Cleveland area. Giant Eagle, Shop ‘n Save and Walmart still list the products on their websites, though some customers have reported not being able to find them in stores.
Company lineage
Uncle Charley’s was founded in 1988 by the late Charlie Armitage. For the first decade or so, the Apollo native bootstrapped it out of a cinder-block building off Route 66, also in Parks Township.
Armitage grew it into a $12 million company and, in 2014, sold it to longtime business partners Len Caric and Jim Rudolph with financial backing from Tecum Capital. Armitage endured personal tragedy just a few years before the sale when his son and company president Charles Stanley “Chas” Armitage Jr. died in a plane crash in West Virginia.
Caric and Rudolph added workers, boosted revenue and rolled out new packaging that turned Uncle Charley’s from what looked like a discount brand into a premium one, even as the recipes stayed the same. The genial-looking man on the modern packaging, it’s worth noting, isn’t the real Uncle Charley.
The duo sold the brand to Village Gourmet in 2020 and the building to a separate investor in 2021. Along the way, Village Gourmet trimmed the Parks Township workforce from about 60 to 32 employees.
“We are surprised,” Rudolph said. “The business was doing well when we sold it.”
Rising ingredient costs could be to blame, as the global price of pork more than doubled within a year of the sale.
But changes to the business model also could have driven Uncle Charley’s out of its hometown, according to Rudolph.
“They didn’t do what we did,” Rudolph said, declining to elaborate.
Caric declined to comment.
On the market
Last Sunday’s storm complicated Uncle Charley’s withdrawal from Parks Township.
High winds ripped off most of the roof and pried apart the block walls of a storage building, possibly damaging $100,000 worth of equipment in the process, a representative from the auction company said. The main building, from where Braden watched the storm unfold, was somehow unscathed.
“We are currently assessing the damage from Sunday’s high winds and are engaging a contractor for necessary repairs,” Kemp said.
Penn Township-based Triple T Properties owns the site, however.
Prudential Realty Co. has it listed for $1.65 million, boasting of a fully refrigerated processing plant and warehouse, 2,000 square feet of frozen storage and floor drains throughout the facility.
A manufacturer, a contracting company and a food production firm have expressed interest in acquiring the property, according to listing agent Brad Ring of Prudential Realty. Recent damage will not immediately impact the listing, he said.
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The former Uncle Charley’s plant is one of several buildings in Parks Bend Farms Industrial Park, a project of the Armstrong County Industrial Development Council. According to Michael Baker, chairman of the IDC, the park is at least 95% occupied, making the sausage company’s departure all the more puzzling.
“We can try to work with somebody to bring somebody in, but, ultimately, it’s in private hands,” Baker said. “Obviously, we’d like to see jobs back in there again.”