Bri and Nick Naylor, spouses, and co-owners of Solsage Sausage Food Truck loved making sausage in their hometown of Pittsburgh. When fate found them relocated to Colorado Springs for work and then furloughed during the pandemic, they found their dream embracing their culinary roots and a community that has embraced their taste of home with a hint of spice and a flurry of flavor.
Bri explains, “We do have kind of a fun story. I mean, it wasn’t necessarily fun at the moment.” In 2020, her husband worked in car financing in Pittsburgh, and she was in digital marketing, in a corporate position.
“We had actually moved out here to Colorado from Pittsburgh with my husband’s company. And then 2020 hit, and he lost his job, unfortunately, and I was being furloughed and un-furloughed.” Her husband had a history in the culinary arts and worked for quite a few restaurants back in Pennsylvania. He had always enjoyed the process of sausage making and initially started it as a hobby on the side with a KitchenAid mixer.
“Our friends and family really enjoyed the product that he was creating,” continues Bri. “And it encouraged him to kind of pursue it a little bit more. But we had our jobs, we were comfortable, and everything was kind of going in a steady direction with our careers. It was just something we did.”
Nick adds that their dream was always to do a food truck. “We just wanted to make sure that we had enough liquid [funding] to start. And unfortunately, COVID did let me lose my job, but fortunately, we were able to do this. So, we decided we wanted to be a sausage company.”
The fastest way, he says, to market the proof-of-concept would be to sell it on a food truck. “I mean, I want to be in stores,” Nick says. “That’s the objective: to have a profit in stores. But for right now, this food trucking is amazing. It’s so much fun.”
Building the Solsage Sausage Food Truck
Bri explains that they found a truck in Walsenburg. “It was in rough shape. It was a taco truck. And long story short, we purchased it. We ended up canceling our wedding, which was supposed to happen in 2020, and we used our wedding funds to purchase the food truck.”
The Naylors spent the summer of 2020 working on it. Nick built everything out by hand: the electrical, the plumbing, every bit of equipment that had to go in there. “And we hit the ground running,” Bri says. “2020 was a very good time to be a food truck. It was kind of this kismet timing where we hit the scene when people didn’t have any other food options other than mobile or pickup or takeout, or anything like that. So we kind of catapulted into popularity because of what we were serving.”
Bri says they hit the market strong and quickly got a following. “Our friends and family out here, everybody was very supportive.” They did that for a solid year and became Air Force football vendors, which really helped build the brand and helped kick their business into gear with higher volume. “It’s just been great. We’ve served at every kind of business and gathering and celebration. I mean, just everything humanly imaginable, we’ve served sausage at.”
It also comes down to having the right menu items. Nick says they wanted to keep the menu simple when they first opened. “I wanted to keep it sustainable and make it really easy for us. Our shopping list was only about 12 things, and that included the prep work and anything that went on a burger. So, we’ve learned what worked. I started doing a bratwurst about a year into our business that took over from our sweet Italian sausage, and we just started making different flavors. We found out what people like here.”
Nick points to a heavy German influence in the area as well. “We were really thinking, ‘OK, side items …we don’t want too many things that are perishable,’ and it hit us, like, ‘You can’t really find pierogies out here. Pierogies were something like street food back in Pittsburgh. You get pierogies walking into a Steelers game.”
Pierogies a Hit in Colorado
Bri continues, “I mean, the audience that we reach with those pierogis. People come up to the truck, they immediately know maybe it’s our color scheme of black and gold, our ‘yinzer rogis’. And when you’re from Pittsburgh, you’re a yinzer. ‘What are yinz doing? Where are yinzs going?’ So, people immediately pick up on the ‘yinzer’ aspect of what we’re doing!”
Bri says it transports some of their customers back home. “Not that Pennsylvania is our prime market here, but it just adds kind of a special connection to the people who have moved out here from Pennsylvania, just like us, and maybe missed some touches of home.” But then, she adds, the Coloradans who have maybe never had a pierogi in their life and don’t even know how to say it, get to experience a whole new kind of Americanized culture that we brought with us.”
But Solsage Sausage is, of course, all about the sausage. The Spicy Italian is a must-have. Nick says, “It’s one of those things when moving out here, we didn’t see the Spicy Italian as much. I was trying to really get down to that similar flavor (in the making of the sausage), because that’s a big seller at every single cookout in western Pennsylvania. So, we didn’t want to copy it. We wanted to get really close to it and have it our own way. So, it was just one of those things coming out here.”
Nick also says everything changed at one point because of a single ingredient. “All of a sudden – I’m not going to kid around with this one – when we moved out here, we went down to Pueblo for the Chile Festival, and I kid you not I thought we were going to get spoons and go around and eat chili. It hit me, ‘Holy cow, these people love their green chiles.’ I bought a bushel. We brought it back home. I started tinkering with, ‘How can we get this on our menu as well and start serving it some way?’ I’ll tell you what, man, put green chili in a sausage, and it is selling. It’s incredible.”
The Green Chile Revelation in Sausage
The big thing is, he says, with the chiles, “I don’t think you can put too many on from what our experience is here. But anytime I get extra chiles, I’m like, ‘What’s obnoxious?” and the customers go, ‘You can’t be obnoxious with it.’ The mustard was a big thing too. The bratwurst that we make – we probably sampled around four or five different spicy brown mustards. Then we tried probably two different stone grounds. But then we tried a little bit of just yellow mustard, seeing if that would work with it. We then added in a homemade pickled slaw that goes on top of it as well. We wanted that balance because we knew acidity would be there with that vinegar and how we pickled it.”
Bri is proud of its following because it is a testament to the flavors they provide. “The people who come to us strictly for the pierogies … honestly, those are one of our biggest sellers … are people who have never had them before that are now absolutely addicted to them and follow us all over the city for them. And we’re not a small city, so when people travel 20 minutes to come to our location we’ve even had customers come up from Pueblo and say, ‘We came up here just to try your food.’ It’s remarkable. I mean, to have somebody come specifically for what started out as just this tiny little business for us, that was a necessity but also not something that we ever envisioned a kind of growing to this level. At this point, at this stage and two years into the business, it’s just incredible, and so much fun.”
