Sausage Kingdom Expanding Its Realm
“Hey you, come on over here and try some sausage,” Jordan Monkarsh barks at a couple of tourists strolling the Venice Boardwalk. “Come on. It’s free. . . . What do you like--mild or spicy?”
After 20 years, the heckling and free samples of Monkarsh’s Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom have become a familiar part of the Venice Beach experience and something of a Los Angeles institution, thanks to high-profile locations at Dodger Stadium, Universal City Walk and Westside Pavilion.
Now, Monkarsh is hoping to duplicate this success in far less opulent settings--such as the Ohio Turnpike.
Through licensing arrangements with Host Marriott Corp., Aramark Corp. and others, Jody Maroni’s are popping up in airports, toll plazas and outlet malls, expanding Monkarsh’s sausage kingdom to 17 stores in the West and Midwest, with plans for another 20 next year.
“I’d like to have 200 or 300 stores over the next three or four years,” Monkarsh says.
This kind of major-league expansion would have been virtually impossible for Monkarsh to achieve on his own. Although Jody Maroni’s has a large manufacturing operation in Inglewood, a cookbook and a spot in the meat case of local Costco warehouses and Trader Joe’s stores, the entire operation will gross just $11 million this year.
To get his $3 and $4 Yucatan Chicken sausage and Louisiana Boudin Hot Links in front of the masses, Monkarsh needed hospitality giants such as Host and Aramark, which have the capital as well as leases on prime real estate around the country.
These heavyweights are giving Jody Maroni’s access to hot locations, such as the Eat Street food court, which is opening on New York’s 42nd Street in February.
“To me, that’s the most exciting one yet,” Monkarsh says. “I mean, where else do all L.A. boys want to go?”
While savvy managers are expanding his brand and buying his sausage, Monkarsh and development president Wendy Yurgo, formerly a top manager at Cinnabon, are polishing up the Jody Maroni’s concept so they can franchise it in the markets that prove most successful.
Letting a more experienced operator such as Host Marriott shoulder the initial burden of expansion is a smart, if less profitable, tactic, say restaurant and franchising experts. It’s a low-risk way to help Jody Maroni’s become a known commodity and it could also teach Makarsh and his team how to operate more efficiently.
“They can learn a lot from [Host Marriott],” says Don Boroian, chairman of franchise consulting firm Francorp Inc. in Olympia Fields, Ill. “I mean, it’s one thing to run a very successful local business, but it’s another to operate something regionally or nationally.”
Certainly, the risk of failure is high in the franchise world. Although promoters point to a dated government report citing a 90%-plus success rate for franchises, newer studies have shown a failure rate as high as 75%, says Boca Raton, Fla.-based franchise attorney Keith Kanouse.
There’s also the question of whether Monkarsh can persuade New Yorkers and Midwesterners to trade in their hot dogs and bratwurst for splashy L.A. concoctions such as Garlic-Orange-Cumin links.
No one has yet been able to turn a sausage stand into a successful national concept, Boroian says. Even the well-known New York-based hot dog maker Nathan’s Famous Inc. struggled when it tried to introduce its simple product into other parts of the country.
But Monkarsh always has managed to buck the odds. In 1991, he signed a deal with Marriott to sell sausages at Dodger Stadium--an unlikely coup for a business with just one tiny Venice Beach location.
In retrospect, Monkarsh says that deal was more of an ego boost than a profit enhancer. Few people who learned of the name were willing to drive to Venice just to pick up a sausage sandwich.
“If you don’t have a lot of points of sale, you can’t recoup the marketing and other dollars involved in being there,” Monkarsh says.
These days, it’s a much different story. Customers who try his sausages at Staples Center or Dodger Stadium can also buy them at retail locations such as Trader Joe’s and Costco, or from franchised stands in entertainment centers like the Block at Orange.
“Jody Maroni’s has been able to get some good locations and achieve some rather decent volumes,” says Ron Paul, a restaurant consultant and president of Technomic Inc. “They could be the one that breaks the mold.”
Friends tell Monkarsh they’re surprised he’s made it this far, given the taboo that red meat and sausage carry among many health-conscious Angelenos.
To appeal to this set, Monkarsh has developed a full line of chicken, turkey and duck sausages, saving higher-fat pork and beef for traditional Polish and Italian sausages.
He learned sausage making as a child from his father, Max, who ran a butcher shop in Studio City which he eventually inherited.
“I had to cut up the chicken, wait on the ladies and make the sausage,” Monkarsh says. “I never thought I would be doing it 30 years later.”
After graduating from UC Berkeley, and holding down a series of food-related jobs, including part-time caterer, he decided to use his knowledge (and his dad’s shop) to set up a sausage cart on the boardwalk in 1979.
Naturally shy, Monkarsh, whose ancestors are Polish, developed a brash Italian persona--Jody Maroni--to sell the Italian sausage he made.
“Would you buy from Jordan Monkarsh’s Italian Sausage Kingdom?” Monkarsh asks with laugh. “The whole idea of hawking and street sales was very foreign to me and this Jody Maroni character helped. I could be more brazen, aggressive, even assaultive.”
By cajoling customers into sampling the product, he increased his sales, and in 1984, the year the Olympics came to Los Angeles, was able to move into a free-standing building, which he still occupies in Venice.
He began selling to white-tablecloth restaurants and rolling out new, more exotic variations, with hopes of eventually opening his own gourmet shop in his father’s Studio City location.
Those plans were shelved when his core sausage business took off, he says. And the roles of father and son have now reversed.
Long retired, 81-year-old Max Monkarsh now helps out in his son’s business, greeting customers and wiping down the umbrella tables outside between chats with friends and regulars.
The tiny stand, which occupies a prime corner between the basketball courts and skate rental booths, still looks much the same as it did 15 years ago.
After years of thinking on a grand scale, chasing silver palates with gourmet inventions, Monkarsh is returning to his roots and working the basic hot dog into the menu in an attempt to reach more customers.
“If you think about it,” Monkarsh says, “a hot dog is really the classic American sausage.”
