Ask the family who owns Ray’s Sausage Co. what has made their souse meat their top seller for 74 years and you’ll get an unequivocal answer.
“It’s the spices – and we make our own spices,” said Renee Marilyn Cash, who started working in the family business when she was a preteen, and now is company president.
Similar to head cheese, souse is usually made from various pig parts, sliced and served like cold cuts. It often has a jelly-like texture, but Cash takes pride in that her company’s souse meat doesn’t jiggle. The snout, tongue and ears go into the souse that Ray’s Sausage makes.
“Those are the most exquisite parts,” Cash said. “They’re meaty, and a lot of flavor comes out of them.”
In the processing room, pork that was cooked on-site is on its way to becoming souse meat. Employees grind the meat, mix it with Ray’s signature seasoning made in-house and then dip it into plastic molding pans that are placed into a cooler. A savory aroma wafts through the building, with spices tantalizing the nostrils. All you can do is guess what spices are used – you’ll never know the recipe.
“No one knows that but she and I,” Cash said, referring to her daughter, Leslie Cash-Lester.
Those recipes aren’t only crucial to Ray’s Sausage’s bottom line, they’re essential to upholding a family legacy. Cash learned the spice recipes for the souse meat and sausage the company makes from her father, Raymond C. Cash Sr. He started the business in 1952 at 3146 E. 123rd St. in Cleveland’s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, which remains its location. Cash taught her daughter the spice recipes.
Never doubt that the family doesn’t highly treasure and closely guard its secret spice recipes. When Cash-Lester believed a recent visitor wanted to see her mixing spices, she was irate. She glared at him. Rolled her eyes. Then disappeared behind a swinging door she closed with such force that it flapped for a bit.
“If you asked somebody for their seasoning or what they are doing with their spices, that’s like me asking you for your Social Security number and your checking and savings and investment statements,” Cash-Lester, the executive administrator, would later say.
A small business that has defied the odds for decades
Its souse meat has made Ray’s Sausage a Cleveland institution. When “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern,” the former Travel Channel show, highlighted quintessential Cleveland foods in 2016, Ray’s Sausage souse meat was among them. The product has been in deli cases throughout Northeast Ohio for seven decades and is currently sold at Giant Eagle, Dave’s Market and Marc’s. The company’s other products include: beef souse meat, pork sausage, beef sausage and beef links and pork links.
The business is also an institution because it has defied a number of odds. Just over 3% of all U.S. businesses are owned by Black entrepreneurs and only 12% of family-owned businesses make it to the third generation. One of the biggest odds it has had to defy occurred about two decades ago when the city erroneously pinned fetid odors in the neighborhood on Ray’s Sausage. Serial killer Anthony Sowell lived on Imperial Avenue in a house adjacent to the sausage maker’s building. When he was arrested in 2009, it was revealed the smell came from the decomposing bodies of his victims buried in his home and yard. Sowell was convicted in 2011 of murdering 11 women and died in prison of an undisclosed terminal illness in 2021.
After the city wrongfully singled out the business, the owners were ordered to make costly and unwarranted sewer, plumbing and other repairs. Sales dropped after their reputation was sullied, and it took about five years for business to rebound, Cash said. The hope of moving into a larger facility to expand its national and international sales remains on hold. Fallout from the Sowell-related ordeal has cost the business at least $400,000, Cash and Cash-Lester said. These were funds they could have used to relocate to a larger facility, they said.
“It would have destroyed many businesses,” Cash said.
But Raymond C. Cash’s legacy and his family’s desire to preserve what he built were stronger.
Ray’s Sausage has always been a family affair
Born in Macon, Georgia, Raymond C. Cash Sr. was part of the Great Migration to the North. After serving as a chef in the Army in World War II, he became a butcher at the Sav-Mor supermarket on Quincy Avenue and then East 58th Street. His duties included making sausage, to which he started adding his own blend of spices. Customers loved it.
“The people were saying, ‘Hey, Ray, why don’t you go into business for yourself? So he thought about it for a couple years, and he made that move,” his daughter said.
The butcher bought what had been a small grocery store and the bar next to it in what was then a predominantly Hungarian and Italian neighborhood, Renee Marilyn Cash said. She said a butcher of German heritage, a culture with deep souse meat roots, taught him how to make it. Souse meat also is a tradition in Southern cuisine. Raymond C. Cash Sr. took what he had learned about making souse, added some Southern flair to it, and his product became a favorite in a city then with a growing population of Black Southern transplants.
Ray’s Sausage has always been a family affair. His wife, Thelma Lowe Cash, helped him run the business and took over after he died. One of his business partners was his brother-in-law, Luke Easter, who played for the then-Cleveland Indians. His son, Raymond C. Cash Jr. used to work in the business. He had many Muslim friends, who couldn’t eat pork for religious reasons, and developed the company’s beef souse meat, believed to be the only of that type sold in the country, his sister said. Lisa Cash-Lester, Renee Marilyn Cash’s other daughter, makes the beef link sausage and bulk sausage.
Renee Marilyn Cash was 10 when her parents opened the business. They put her to work folding boxes. By high school she was cooking and passing out Ray’s Sausage samples at local grocery stores while saying, “Shop where it pays and bring home the Ray’s.” It became the company’s slogan.
A few decades later, her two daughters started in the family business – at about the age her mother had – sweeping floors and licking envelopes.
“My grandmother always said if you’re going to work here, you must start from the bottom and you work your way to the top because everybody on top must know what works on the bottom,” Leslie Cash-Lester said.
Like their mother, the daughters started at Ray’s Sausage as youngsters, but never thought they would work there as adults. Both graduated from Wilberforce University in healthcare administration and worked other jobs. By the late 1980s, both had joined the family business.
Renee Marilyn Cash was set on becoming a physical education teacher. She was at Kentucky State University in the 1960s when her father asked her to come home to help out with the business. She did that for two years, returned to college and moved back to Cleveland after she graduated to become a PE teacher in the Cleveland schools.
When her father died in 1977, Renee Marilyn Cash returned to the business on a part-time basis. On school days, she would leave work on the West Side and head to Ray’s Sausage. By the 1980s, juggling two jobs became too much. The family business won out.
“I never meant for it to be my career,” she said. “But because my father taught me everything that he knew, I knew that I would be able to carry on his legacy and maintain the business.”
Why Clevelanders like souse meat made by Ray’s Sausage
Ranie Dixon had a choice to make.
One recent afternoon at Ray’s Sausage he said he was there to buy “a piece of souse meat.” Dixon was given the option of a one- or five-pound loaf.
“You want a one pounder?” Cash-Lester asked him. “It’s $15. Do you want mild, hot or extra hot?”
Hot for Dixon. That’s what he’s been eating for decades.
Why?
“It’s the best souse meat in town!” he said, offering a c’mon everybody knows that look.
Dixon likes eating his souse with cheese on saltine crackers.
“I used to eat it on the hood of a car back in the day,” he said laughing, recalling hanging out with friends, enjoying good times and good food. “I’m old school with it. I’m keeping it real.”
At Dixon’s Market (no relation to Ranie Dixon) on Hough Avenue, a sign advertising Ray’s Sausage products appears above the deli case. Under it are loaves of souse meat.
“The souse meat is definitely the number one seller,” said George Dixon IV, co-owner of the store his family has owned for more than 70 years. “We’ve been selling it for decades.”
(Cash said the store has been selling it since the 1950s.)
Hot and extra hot are customer favorites. He said people come from near and far to buy it. Someone recently called from Akron asking if the corner store carried the souse. They’ve since become a regular customer. Souse is one of those foods that folks who love it feel compelled to tell you about (even if you didn’t ask), the shop owner said.
“A lot of people eat with their eyes, and they say, “OK, maybe not,” he said of them seeing the small pieces of cooked meat in a deli slice.” But once they taste it, they say it’s like no other taste.”
Some customers tell him the only way to eat the souse is with saltine crackers. Others say only use club crackers. Then there are those who will only eat it with Doritos. Don’t forget the Colby cheese.
“As long as they’re making souse, we’ll be selling their souse,” said George Dixon IV.
Determined to keep a promise
When Cash-Lester was a youngster helping out at Ray’s Sausage, she made a promise to her grandfather.
“I told him I was going to run this place and put his product all over the world,” she said.
Ray’s Sausage has shipped products throughout the United States, Canada and parts of the Middle East. The women said the business could ship even more sausage and souse if they had a larger production facility. The current building is too small for the walk-in coolers needed to store the higher volume of product required to accommodate an expanded customer base outside of Cleveland.
Shortly before the city started cracking down on the business a few years before Sowell was arrested in 2009 – incorrectly assuming it was the source of the noxious odors – the owners were actively looking for a larger location. They had found a good prospect, not far away, in the Lee-Seville neighborhood.
Then the putrid smells began on Imperial Avenue.
Ray’s Sausage’s owners were baffled and irritated that the city would seek to pin the odors on the business that then had nearly a 60-year tie to the neighborhood. As a meat manufacturer, it was under strict federal regulations, including by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration.
Zack Reed, who was then the council member for the ward that included Ray’s Sausage, agreed with the Cash family.
“I just felt that from a city standpoint, what we did to them was wrong, and we should have figured out the best way we possibly could have helped them out,” he said.
The city promised to assist Ray’s Sausage in finding a larger location, and to help the owners with grants and other city incentives. Sales had dropped after the Sowell debacle, plus they were stuck footing the bill for the unneeded repairs. That would be the only way the business could afford to move, Cash and Cash-Lester said. Reed said he intervened, when necessary, to make sure the city stayed on task in finding Ray’s Sausage the right building with the right financial package.
Cash-Lester agreed.
“I have to give him his flowers,” she said of Reed. “He really tried to help us.”
After redistricting took effect in 2010, Ray’s Sausage was no longer in Reed’s ward. The right building with the right financial package never materialized, causing the Cash family much frustration.The hope of relocating dimmed, but it didn’t disappear.
A few years ago, they started working with a nonprofit community development corp., which works with local businesses, but nothing ever materialized.
“The buildings they showed us weren’t suitable and the financial package offered wasn’t adequate,” Cash said.
She wants the city, which has far more resources than a small nonprofit that can tap some public funding, to help Ray’s Sausage find a building to which they can relocate using grants and other city incentives. After all, it was the city – during a previous administration – that promised to help the business for the harm it caused by wrongfully singling them out.
The city is aware that Ray’s Sausage had been working with a local nonprofit, said Sarah Johnson, Cleveland’s chief communications officer.
“The city is absolutely willing to help them relocate,” she wrote of Ray’s Sausage in an email to Signal Cleveland.
Reed, now the city’s business development administrator, agrees.
“I don’t think it’s ever too late for us to help a business that wants to grow and prosper,” he said.
Ray’s Sausage preparing to celebrate 75 years in business
Ray Sausage’s diamond anniversary isn’t until next year, but already the family is making plans. A celebration will be held Oct. 28, 2027 on the lot the business owns next to its building. It will be a time to honor a milestone that few family-owned businesses experience. It will also be a time to tell of Raymond C. Cash Sr.’s dream, his family’s belief in him and their commitment to keeping his legacy alive.
The Cash family takes pride in being old-fashioned when it comes to sausage and souse meat making. They make most of their products the same way he did.
“We have no preservatives,” said Cash-Lester.
Cash is the only family member who was there on day one of the business and continues to work there. She’s on the job at 5 a.m. and oversees every aspect of the business, but she may be pulling back some in the future.
“I’ll be 85 in December,’’ she said. “It will be time for me to move on. I’ve had 26 surgeries – two knee replacements and four cancers.”
For her, moving on doesn’t mean disengaging.
“I’ll never truly leave the business,” she said. “I’m committed to making sure my father’s legacy continues. Shop where it pays and bring home the Ray’s.”
