Legacy and loyalty are bred out of the work ethic of owners but also the loyalty of customers. With Gagliano’s Market in Pueblo, Vince Gagliano continues the tradition of his family’s namesake which has been in business since 1921. In the past 30 years, they have brought into their own locally sourced products as well as legacy items like award-winning olive oil from his uncle’s farm in Sicily.
“We took over in 1997 from my cousins, and, at that point in time, they were older, and the store was kind of dying. What we did was another first-generation story where another immigrant stepped up to work here and that’d be my parents. And we kind of wanted to change a little bit and become more of a specialty shop than more of just a grocery.”
Family Tutelage
Under family tutelage, this next generation kept a lot of the mainstays like the homemade pasta, but the amount of pasta was expanded to 160 different cuts. Gagliano’s sausages, a staple for decades, is a product that customers drive from far and wide to get. “We’ve expanded our sausage production now to a commercial USDA facility so that’s kind of quadrupled the amount of pork we make every year, or sausage we make every week.”
Gagliano’s Market, as a business, also moved to make a lot more products including “take-and-bake” items including sandwiches, lasagnas, and meatballs as well as Italian cookies. The shop also started doing pizza. “My cousins weren’t doing that. They were just buying stuff and selling it like a grocery store.”
Keeping the Distinctive Flavor
His cousins’ previous supplies came from A&G, a franchise supermarket chain. “We found a lot more Italian wholesalers, and we’re now getting stuff directly from Italy.” Gagliano’s imports their own Italian olive oil from an uncle’s farm in Sicily, which just took a silver award for olive oil in the world. Gagliano puts it simply: “We’re like coming to your grandma’s house. You’re going to get really good food when you come in.”
Gagliano still buys the spices from the same company they have used for nearly 70 years. “We keep the spices for the sausage. We try to not deviate from the original.”
A point of pride is that “the same hands make everything so if you were going to eat at my house, you’d know that the sauce – it’s my mom’s recipe … and the meatballs are my mom’s recipe. My dad, he’s 82 years old, and he [still] makes the mix for every batch of the sausage. That’s his job every Sunday. He’ll make 30 cases of pork butts all cut up, 2,200 pounds. And then he makes the mix for every single box.”
Pueblo Chile Sausage
One of their bestsellers – and the most local – is the Pueblo chile sausage. The Pueblo chile, Gagliano explains, was invented by an Italian named Dr. Michael Bortolo, who is from the same hometown in Sicily. ” We just try to incorporate a little bit of Pueblo with the ethnicity that’s in Pueblo. I actually just started making a Pueblo chile chorizo.”
“So, I make the sausage on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I deliver on Thursday. And then the ladyfingers [cookies], we’ll make on a Saturday. My wife will help when she’s not at work. She’ll make up the poticas and the pizzelles. It’s a family [thing]. Everybody comes and pitches in.”
“I call it the immigrant work ethic, where you’re going to work to make it in life. Nobody hands you anything and says, ‘Here!’ My mom used to say, when I was a kid, she grabbed me once and put my head against the window and said, ‘Look, there’s no money tree outside. There’s a peach tree. There’s an apple tree. There’s no money tree. So, nobody’s going to come knocking on your door.’”
Recreating Gagliano Family Recipes with Touch
It is all about instinct as well. “When we make stuff, we don’t measure anything. You know how people see bakers and they measure?” At Gagliano’s, it’s just done with touch. “We just add the flour as we go and then we touch [the dough] until the cookie feels right. Then we’ll make like 280 dozen cookies at a time. But I do need to find a machine to make a meatball.”
The day we spoke, Gagliano mixed about 200 pounds of beef and pork for meatballs. “I do need to find a machine to make it because my hands get a little bit tired.”
Gagliano’s Family Legacy with Deep Roots
Besides hard work, the legacy is hard to ignore. Gagliano’s great uncles opened the store in 1921 selling milk door-to-door in Pueblo. After World War II, when immigrants could apply to come to the United States under the Marshall Act, Vince’s dad and his grandfather came to Pueblo to join their kin.
“The family said, ‘Why don’t you stay and work here?’ My dad then went back a few years later to Italy and married my mom and brought her back.” They were all from a little town called Lucca Sicilia.
Gagliano’s grandfather on his mother’s side came to the United States in 1915 for around eight years riding on his Harley, making money and then would go back to Sicily. Even Vince’s great-grandfather came to the US in the 1890s going back and forth 13 times to Sicily make money so he could buy land.
Gagliano says it is the immigrant way and explains the comparison to today. “It’s kind of like the people in Mexico, they really don’t have any intention of staying. They just want to make money and go home and buy land or buy stuff. That’s where their home is. But this is the place where the money’s at.”
Back in those early days in the earlier part of the 20th Century, there was a lot of action in Pueblo. “You had the steel mill. You had the mines. They were looking for laborers, so all you had to do was have a strong back. One person would sponsor another person. People knew that they came here, they could get a job working, more work than there was in Sicily. There they were starving to death.”
The Use of Technology to Get the Word Out
Even during the pandemic when Gagliano closed the walk-in service to protect his parents, a webpage kept the fires burning because people needed and wanted that taste of home. “People were like, ‘Oh, I got to get my sausage! I got to get my order in!’ It [definitely] helped. We had just one phone at the store, and it was always ringing and busy. People were complaining, ‘I can’t get through. The phone’s always busy!’ So, I did the webpage and we put a big banner outside.”
Gagliano also used a lot of social media. “That way I could bring people into the store. When you couldn’t come in, I could bring you life that was going on inside. We don’t do nothing unusual – our food’s not fancy. It’s just what we grew up with, you know? It’s poor people food.”
That said, it is tradition and tradition never dies. “People depend on us for their holidays. I mean, when you think about it, they depend on us having our food at their table with their family on Sunday or on Christmas or Thanksgiving Day. People are like, ‘I have to have this.’ So, if there’s anything that talks about the legacy, it’s people’s need for what you sell. “
We love Gagliano’s!! I have been going there since I was a little girl and my dad would sell them goat cheese. The best goat cheese around from Sciacca Goat Dairy in Aguilar, CO. We always picked up sausage and other lunch meats. Everything was so yummy. I now live in Arizona and make a special trip to come up and get sausage. My sister picked it up for me this year, because it was a Sunday that I was coming through. We now have your wonderful sausage for Christmas morning, a family tradition of ours. A tradition that means more than you know! Thank you for making this possible and keeping the tradition alive!