In 2005, Kevin Roberts, CEO of the communications and advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, published a book about the future of business. The most successful companies, he wrote, created more than just admiration or respect in their customers. They inspired a deep, almost romantic, attachment. He had a name for the businesses that managed to achieve this intense bond. In fact, it was the title of his book: Lovemarks. It went on to be translated into 14 different languages and, with more than 150,000 copies in print, become one of the more influential marketing books of the century.
Lovemarks is part of an age-old quest for the marketer’s Holy Grail — a product that consumers love as though it were family. Behemoths like Apple, Starbucks and Coca-Cola seem to possess it, but seekers could do worse than to look as well to the small town of Evergreen, Alabama, roughly midway between Mobile and Montgomery. For close to 80 years, Evergreen has been the home of one of the most fervently beloved brands in the South: Conecuh Sausage.
Online fan communities sing the praises of Conecuh. Sausage pilgrims from across Alabama and beyond flock to the Conecuh gift store in Evergreen. (The company recently moved to a new $58 million factory in nearby Andalusia, and there are plans to open a second gift store there.) And the cult is only growing: Since Rouses opened its first five Alabama stores, in 2014, sales of Conecuh have increased by 40%. With the sausage now available in all Rouses Markets, that number has grown another 20% this year.
The first time I encountered Conecuh was in a Mobile grocery store, around Thanksgiving. A handwritten sign in the freezer announced that, due to high demand, shoppers were limited to two packages each. Obviously, I was intrigued. How did this happen, I wondered? How had a product, made by a family company, in a town of less than 4,000 people, with a name that most people didn’t even know how to pronounce (it’s kuh-NEK-ah), become such a sensation?
Conecuh’s patriarch, 73-year-old John Crum Sessions, gives few interviews; he’s largely content to let his sausage speak for itself. But he was recently willing to talk a little on the phone. He described how and father, Henry Sessions, started the company soon after World War II under the name Quick Freeze. The “Freeze” part referred to the 125 freezers that they rented out to local farmers and other customers in those days before widespread home refrigeration. As a sideline, they operated as a slaughterhouse, delivering meat up and down Route 31, as far as Montgomery.
“I was there as a little boy, just running around the plant,” he said, adding: “You didn’t have all these regulations then.”
John Crum and his mother, Sue, took over in 1978, after Henry died of a heart attack. By then, Conecuh Quick Freeze was doing less freezing than selling a singular product: hickory smoked sausage, about as wide as a quarter, filled with a finely ground mixture of pork, sage and spice.
They say that you never want to know how sausage is made — and luckily, on that subject, Sessions remains tight-lipped: “We grind it, we put the spices in, we stuff it, and then we smoke it and pack it,” is about as far as he will go — though he does let it slip that the smoke time is about three-and-a-half hours. Conecuh is now run by his son, John Henry Sessions. The original Hickory Smoke flavor remains the company’s bestseller, though the milder variety sold as Original (this is a little confusing) is also a hit. It’s packed in hog casings and contains more sage. Cracked Black Pepper is my personal favorite, with the sweet-spicy pop of its namesake peppercorns. “As soon as you get tired of one flavor, you can just move on to the other,” John Crum Sessions says.
Even a lovemark can have one fan that loves it more than all the rest: the one that goes beyond mere affection, or even adoration, into full-blown passion. For Conecuh, that person is undoubtedly David C. Webb, a 57-year-old warehouse supervisor who lives in Mobile, Alabama. Webb runs Conecuh Life, a hub for Conecuh fandom including news, videos and hundreds of recipes. Webb has also become famous for throwing out packages of Conecuh Sausage from his krewe’s float during Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebrations.
As it is for many, Webb’s attachment to the sausage began in childhood, when he was about 13. He remembers the moment as a kind of Alabama idyll: Saturday morning; a family gathering; uncles and cousins in abundance; Crimson Tide on the television; and his dad opening up a few pounds of sausage from the commissary at the Coast Guard base where he was stationed, and throwing it on the grill. (Conecuh is still sold in military commissaries around the world.) “I remember just instantly being like, ‘Wow, this is some really good sausage,’” he says. “I just wanted to associate myself with them.”
About 15 years ago, Webb began making YouTube videos with grilling tips and other Conecuh advice. On Facebook, he joined the Conecuh Sausage Fan Club group, becoming one of its most prolific posters. He enjoyed the community but, honestly, he wanted even more opportunity to celebrate Conecuh.
Then, in 2022, he was sitting around with an old fraternity brother. Webb was talking, you may be surprised to hear, about Conecuh — how much he loves Conecuh, how many posts he’d been writing about Conecuh. Finally, the guy said, “Man, you’re just leading that Conecuh life, aren’t you?”
It was as though the clouds had parted. “I was just like, ‘How did I never think of that?’ Webb says. By the end of the day, he had registered the Conecuh Life domain name and started the Facebook group, which has now exceeded 61,000 members and is growing by as many as 1,000 members per month. His Mardi Gras tradition began 10 years ago and is now subsidized by Conecuh: they supply him with several hundred pounds of sausage to throw every year. For his own use, he has three refrigerators at home. He estimates that at least one and a half are filled entirely with Conecuh.
I will not say whether it’s surprising or not to learn that Webb has remained married for 34 years. “She loves it, too!” he says, of his wife. “She doesn’t get into it as much as I do, but she understands that I’m going to do what I do. And I’m going to provide her with grilled Conecuh around the pool every summer.”
Such a summer cookout is, of course, the most obvious location to find links of Conecuh. The heat of a well-fired grill is the perfect way to caramelize the skin to a sweet and satisfying snap. But a stint in a cast-iron pan or the oven works too. And look, nobody is going to judge you if, in a pinch, you slide a few slices into the microwave and heat them till the skin starts to pucker and the juices start to run. As for using the sausage in dishes, a quick perusal of the Conecuh Life recipes section shows it popping up in everything from fried rice to flatbreads, from Ethiopian collard greens to Cajun potato salad. (Webb is partial to his own recipe for Conecuh paella.) The only category in which the site is sorely lacking is dessert — but surely, somewhere, great minds are at work on this omission.
And summer is hardly the only Conecuh season: Indeed, each holiday season brings Conecuh’s spicy Christmas Hot flavor; devotees await its arrival as anxiously as if it were Santa’s reindeer. For that matter, the roast created by Rouses Markets would make a fine anchor to any holiday spread. Rouses butchers stuff a boneless Boston butt with the sausage, then wrap that in bacon for a kind of triple-strength blast of pork.
Of course, for millions, the season most associated with Conecuh is football season, when the sausage appears at tailgates throughout the South. Technically, Conecuh is the official smoked sausage of the University of Alabama, But a quick perusal of the internet confirms that fans at Auburn, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Ole Miss, and of course Alabama — and more — also claim the sausage as their own, officially or unofficially. I’m not from the South, but even I know that this might be the highest measure of Conecuh’s power. If a sausage can unite the SEC, could it be the key to world peace?
