Conecuh Sausage is on the Move
EVERGREEN Ala. June 16, 2025
Al.com
John Crum Sessions was just a teenager when his father, Henry Sessions, put him to work – doing everything from sweeping floors to stuffing sausage — at the family’s Conecuh Quick Freeze sausage-processing plant in Evergreen, the seat of Alabama’s Conecuh County.
“I rode my bicycle down there to work,” Sessions recalls. “So, I was about 15, 14.”
A decade later, though, Sessions had to step up and take charge of the family business when, in 1978, his father died of a heart attack, leaving it up to Sessions and his mother, Sue Sessions, to keep it going.
“I didn’t have much choice,” Sessions says. “And my mother, she helped a lot.
“She was real dedicated to the plant,” he adds. “She was 65 years old when my father died, and she hadn’t ever worked. But she went to work after that. She was here every day.”
Then, another eight years later, Sessions rebranded the company from Conecuh Quick Freeze – the name his father had given the business when he was renting lockers for families to freeze and store their meats and vegetables, before he branched out into making sausage – to what everybody now knows as Conecuh Sausage, the iconic Alabama brand with a loyal, nationwide fan base.
“It had been named Conecuh Quick Freeze for so long, and we were making sausage, we weren’t freezing anything,” Sessions says. “So, we decided to change it to Conecuh Sausage.”
Now, as the company’s CEO and president, Sessions is overseeing another major milestone in Conecuh Sausage’s 78-year history.
In September, the company will move all its sausage-making operations from Evergreen — where the Sessions family has made their hickory-smoked sausage using the same recipe since 1947 — to Andalusia in neighboring Covington County.
“Andalusia is just 26 miles away,” Sessions likes to remind people.
Sessions adds that “just about all” the current Evergreen employees plan to work at the Andalusia plant.
“We will have 100 from here going over there,” he says. “We’ll probably be hiring about 30 to 40 (more) over there.”
The new, $58-million, 107,000-square-foot processing plant will allow Conecuh Sausage to double its production and expand its distribution footprint, Sessions says. Currently, Conecuh Sausage is available in stores in 26 states and online nationwide.
The move to Andalusia became necessary, he adds, because updated USDA regulations would have required upgrades at the Evergreen plant that proved to be too costly for the company.
“We decided that it’d be too much cost to do that,” Sessions says. “So we decided to go to Andalusia.”
The City of Andalusia was awarded a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of a broader initiative to bring new manufacturing to the city, and the city, in turn, provided infrastructure improvements such as water and sewage for the new Conecuh Sausage facility.
Other states in the Midwest courted Conecuh Sausage to move its operations there, Sessions adds, but remaining in Alabama and staying close to home was a priority.
“It was very important to stay in Alabama, with Andalusia offering the space and the opportunity for our expansion,” he says.
“Andalusia is very excited about us coming,” Sessions adds. “The mayor and the council and the commissioners — they think it’s one of the greatest things that’s happened to Andalusia.”
Sessions, who still calls Evergreen home, is asked how the folks in his hometown feel about the move.
“They say that we’re talking about us changing our name to Covington Sausage,” he says. “But I told them, I said, ‘Well, we got the Conecuh River over there (in Covington County). We got the Conecuh National Forest over there. And now we’re going to have Conecuh Sausage.’”
While the sausage-making operations may be moving, the popular Conecuh Sausage gift shop — which the Sessions family opened nearly four years ago off I-65 at Exit 96 in Evergreen — isn’t going anywhere.
“It’s gonna stay here,” Sessions says. “We always (want to be) a part of the city of Evergreen.”
The one-stop shop for all things Conecuh Sausage – from sausage and bacon to T-shirts and trucker hats – has proven to be a huge hit with travelers, who pull over the interstate to grab a sausage dog, take a bathroom break, get a photo with the grillin’ and grinnin’ Conecuh Sausage cartoon pig and load up their coolers with more sausage for their ride home.
“About 350 people a day go in that store on average,” Sessions says. “And during Christmas and Thanksgiving, it’ll be from 800 to 1,200 people. We didn’t build the parking lot big enough.”
As it has been since Henry Sessions started the business, Conecuh Sausage remains a family-owned company.
John Henry Sessions, John Crum and Sheilah Sessions’ son, is the company’s vice president, and his wife, Jamie Sessions, runs the gift shop with their daughter, Kristan.
Kristan, who is majoring in finance and accounting at the University of Alabama, and her brother, John Travis Sessions, who is entering UA this fall, both plan to come back to help their family run the company after college.
Keeping the business all in the family, Sessions says, has “worked out good for us.”
Two years ago, Conecuh Sausage partnered with another Alabama brand, Millie Ray’s, on a Conecuh Sausage yeast roll, and last year, the company teamed with Andalusia’s Bluebird Coffee Company on a Conecuh Sausage medium-roast coffee.
The company is selective about what products it lends the Conecuh Sausage brand to, Sessions says.
“We just look for high quality and a good product that we sample and see that is up to our standards,” he says.
The Sessions family also owns a 250-acre farm in southern Illinois where they hunt deer and grow corn and soybeans.
Whenever they’re up there on a visit, Sessions often wears a shirt or cap emblazoned with the Conecuh Sausage logo.
It’s always good for a conversation.
“When you walk in, you’d think you’re a celebrity in some places with your cap on and your shirt,” he says. “They just go wild.
“They just want to know all about Conecuh and where they can get it,” Sessions says. “And we give them where they can order it online.”
And most of the time, they even pronounce it right.
“Some of ’em have a little problem with it,” he says. “Some of ’em call it ‘Con-e-KEW’ or ‘Cah-neck-EE,’ but most of ’em call it ‘Cuh-NECK-uh.’”
