As if being the garlic capital of the world wasn’t enough,
Gilroy will have another delicious food to add brag about:
sausage.
As if being the garlic capital of the world wasn’t enough, Gilroy will have another delicious food to add brag about: sausage.
San Jose-based Silva Sausage company plans to relocate its processing plant to a 52,000 square-foot building along Rossi Lane in southeast Gilroy this winter if all goes according to plan, bringing along 45 employees. Company President Fernando Martins said he also intends to hire about five people locally.
“We’ve outgrown our facility here,” said Martins, who has been working on the relocation with Rick Martins, his brother and the company’s vice president, throughout the past four months along with city officials and building inspectors. The new facility will process meat from all over the country – primarily boneless pork from the Midwest – and grind and chop it into sausage, hot dogs, meatballs and other piquant treats that the Portuguese sausage company is known for.
Gilroy’s Portuguese-American Mayor Al Pinheiro’s favorite Silva Sausage treat is the company’s signature linguica sausage.
“I was so excited that they
were entertaining Gilroy,” said Pinheiro, who personally drove Fernando Martins around town before referring the businessman to Gilroy’s Economic Development Corporation.
Pinheiro said he hoped the Martins brothers would open a satellite deli downtown someday, but Fernando Martins said he expected eventually to run a retail corner out of the new plant some day.
Residents can thank Pinheiro’s long-time connection with the company that began “one night during my younger days,” he said, in the 1970s at the Portuguese Hall in San Jose, where Pinheiro met Manuel Martins – the meat company’s founder and Fernando and Rick Martins’ father. Manuel Martins – who moved to America from Argentina – started Silva Sausage in 1967, but died in 1993, leaving his sons in charge. With 42 years of Silicon Valley development and the siren of cheaper space in Gilroy, Fernando Martins said the move from the company’s 25,000 square-foot space to down south just makes financial sense.
Like his father, Fernando Martins also knew Pinheiro before courting the space in Gilroy. He said the two met about 15 years ago at the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in San Jose.
“I’ve been around the food business all my life,” Fernando said. “It’s a very fun business.”
Despite the recession, Fernando Martins said business has been “real steady” and that last year it “didn’t grow much but didn’t lose anything either.”
“That’s partially because sausage is a real convenience food, and it’s the type of item you can use in so many dishes. It’s ready-made protein,” he said.
