Interviewers: Marvin Bendele and Andrew Busch
Location: Burton Sausage, 11700 Hwy 290, Burton, TX 77835
This interview was originally produced through a collaborative effort of the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, The Central Texas Barbecue Association, and The Southern Foodways Alliance.
It is shared with Foodways Texas as part of a collaboration with the Southern Foodways Alliance to document food stories in Texas.
Describing himself as three-quarters German and one-quarter Bohemian, Jerry Schultz learned the meat business in central Texas’ Czech and German traditions.
Today he owns and runs Burton Sausage, a company that is part slaughterhouse, part sausage producer. Along with his daughter, Nicole Harmel, who also sat down with our interviewers, Schultz has more than twenty employees in the family business. Born in 1945, Schultz says he got into the meat business in 1972; two years later Nicole, the first of his three children, was born. The company started seriously producing sausage in 1982.
