Our Story
Torretta Fine Foods, the home of Carl's Original Recipe Italian Sausage, was founded by Stephen Caruso and Joan Osman (nee Caruso). We are a brother-sister duo whose interest in food and cooking started at a young age. We spent many weekends in the kitchen with our parents, rolling meatballs and dipping way too much bread in the sugo. Growing up, our family was small, but we saw many pictures and heard stories of our grandparents hosting big Sunday dinners, the St. Joseph’s Day table, and countless other celebrations with friends and family from ‘the neighborhood’ a.k.a. Kansas City’s North End.
A couple of years after our dad passed away, in a collection of his cookbooks, we found a notecard with a handwritten recipe for “Caruso’s Restaurant Italian Sausage”. We knew this must be our Grandpa Carl’s recipe from the small restaurant our family operated in the 50s and decided try it for ourselves. His original recipe called for 20lbs of pork! We reduced the amount to a more manageable 4lbs, then made a batch to taste with our spouses to see if it was any good. Spoiler alert: it was great! Since that day, we started brainstorming how we could re-share this recipe with the community.
Grandpa Carl’s original recipe for Italian sausage sparked the idea represented in our first product. However, our mission to bring people together with good food could not be accomplished without also including our other grandfather, John. His farming background and passion for raising livestock helped us narrow our vision. We knew right away that we needed to focus on the base product used to make sausage. The pork! Though John was a practicing physician, he never left his roots in farming and raised pigs on a farm outside of Liberty, Missouri. Reminiscing together, and looking at family photos brought our vision full circle. Create quality and flavorful sausage from pork produced locally in the Midwest.
Since our grandparents were great friends--even prior to being in-lawed--we thought this was the perfect way to honor them. After realizing our vision, we decided to put our decades of business experience to work and began the process of creating a product and brand. The name, Torretta Fine Foods, pays homage to the town in Sicily our Grandpa Carl’s family immigrated from in the early 1900s. Throughout the years, our family bonded while cooking together and making memories in the kitchen. The mission of Torretta Fine Foods is bringing people together to enjoy high quality, delicious food. We look forward to creating products and memories for our family and yours, for decades to come.
