Neese’s Sausage halts production, Triad customers and retailers feel shortage

Neese’s Sausage’s production pause is already showing up in Triad meat counters and grocery shelves, where customers are looking for liver pudding, livermush and sausage from a Greensboro brand many families have bought for generations.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the facility had not requested Food Safety and Inspection Service inspectors, and without one the plant cannot continue production. The agency said no additional suspension had been issued beyond the Sept. 11, 2025, notice of suspension tied to part of the ready-to-eat operation, but the practical result is the same: the plant is not producing now.

That matters at Neese Country Sausage, Inc., 1452 Alamance Church Road in Greensboro, where the company has deep roots in Guilford County. Neese’s says founder J.T. Neese began selling sausage from a covered wagon in 1917, and the business has been at its current Greensboro location since 1933. It is now run by the fourth generation of the Neese family, with a fifth generation on the way. NCpedia says the family had been making sausage since the 1800s and was already making daily deliveries in Greensboro and High Point by 1925.

The shortage is being felt beyond the plant itself. Andrew Daniel of Richard’s Meat & Things and Rodney Jernigan of Charles Place said customers have been asking about the product repeatedly, with calls, walk-ins and drive-through requests coming in almost every day. They said deliveries had become sparse in recent months, and Jernigan said he could sell hundreds of pounds a week if the sausage were available. For small retailers that rely on a steady local staple to bring shoppers back, the pause has immediate business fallout.

WFMY News 2 reported that the ready-to-eat side of the plant, the section associated with liver pudding and livermush, had still not resumed normal operations because USDA officials had not received an adequate corrective action plan. That leaves the key question unresolved: whether the shutdown is a temporary compliance problem or a deeper threat to one of the Triad’s best-known food names.

The USDA’s concern is not minor. FSIS says listeriosis, an infection caused by Listeria monocytogenes, is linked to about 1,600 illnesses and 260 deaths each year in the United States. That risk explains why ready-to-eat production can stay halted until regulators are satisfied that the plant is back in compliance.