Wild or spicy, made with fennel, anise or garlic, there’s nothing like a delicious Italian sausage. Just ask the Verone family, who has been in the sausage business for nearly 100 years. The company was started in 1923 by Joe Verone, who came from Calabria bearing his family’s traditional sausage recipe, and opened a meat-cutting business in Sumner, Wash.

As Italian families tend to do, he then passed the art of meat-cutting and sausage-making down through the generations – first to his eldest son Pete, then to Pete’s son Joe, and now to the youngest generation, Joe’s daughter Renee Verone Flores. Recently, Renee has taken the business to a whole new level.