On Thursday, I noticed something odd. Every so often, I would go digging for clues about Neese’s Country Sausage, which had mysteriously vanished from store shelves without any official explanation. There were a lot of suspects, though. A listeria outbreak at its plant in Greensboro shut down production last year. The longtime CEO and family patriarch, Thomas Neese Jr., died in April. The website went down, only to come back a few weeks later. There were shortages of Neese’s sausage and livermush at grocery stores across North Carolina. Then it seemed to be completely out of stock. People—jokingly—began to jack up the prices of the remaining bricks they had at home.

For months, the company said nothing. At all. Hence, to fill the vacuum, plenty of people wrote their own obituaries for Neese’s. They reminisced about their favorite recipes, many of which called for Neese’s sausage by name. They started to look for something else that would at least come close. People had started to move on.

The only news lately was that a packaging company had sued Neese’s over unpaid bills. So, I went to see what else Neese’s might be late on. Turns out, they were running a little behind on paying property taxes for their facilities in Charlotte and Burlington but eventually settled up in April. Others noticed that the facility in Charlotte was up for sale. So I looked to see if there were any changes at the most basic level. For that, I did a search for Neese’s Country Sausage on the North Carolina Secretary of State’s business lookup. On the annual report, I expected to see, maybe, a change in the company officers. Or, perhaps, that the company had officially filed to dissolve. Or, most likely, no change at all.

Instead, the search came up empty. This was highly unusual. Even dead companies still show up in the archives. Neese’s was gone.

Turns out, that was sign of things to come. On Wednesday, the head of the company, Tommy Neese III, filed to change its official business name for the first time since it officially incorporated in 1947. After 79 years, Neese’s Country Sausage became NCS Enterprises, Inc.

So on Thursday, I started asking around, trying to figure out exactly what that meant. On Friday, the company itself answered that question in the form of a press release:

Yes, this is the same Jones who provided the namesake for Jones Sausage Road, which you’ve probably seen if you’ve drive past Raleigh toward the coast on I-40. The company started in Danville, Virginia and might be best known for the red hot dogs they sell at the Martinsville Speedway. The brand hasn’t been owned by the Jones family for a long time, though. General Mills bought the company in the 1960s, and ConAgra took it over after that. For a time, the old Jones factory in Garner made all sorts of meat products for ConAgra, including Slim Jims. It closed in 2009, after an explosion killed two people. Today, it’s the site of a giant Amazon warehouse.

Jesse Jones’s current owners, the White Packing Company, took over and split off Jesse Jones in 1997, long before the explosion. The White family has deep Virginia ties. Its headquarters have been based in a small office in Raleigh since 2022, but its president, Karl White, is based in Fredericksburg, Virginia according to company filings, and the company had a longtime processing facility 20 miles east in King George.

So, what about Neese’s? The press release, published Friday afternoon by WFMY-TV, goes on:

Remember: Neese’s production plant had been closed for months because of a listeria outbreak. Since then, it hadn’t invited USDA inspectors to come back to check things out, which meant the production line couldn’t reopen. So, will it ever? A Jones company rep wouldn’t comment to WFMY, so the fate of Neese’s main facility outside of Greensboro and its slaughterhouse in Burlington remain unclear. That said, it seems like Jones won’t tinker with what’s inside the sausage (which, notably, is free of fillers and additives), but it might change how it looks on the outside. “We are committed to reintroducing Neese’s products in a way that remains true to the original recipes, while positioning the brand for long-term success,” White said in a story from WGHP-TV.

Hence, Neese’s will once again be Neese’s, mostly? Kinda? But it won’t be exactly the same. The company built its plant behind the original family farmhouse southeast of Greensboro. Its sausage, liver pudding, and other products notably looked and tasted the same for generations. And yes, in the business world, 109 years is an extremely long time for one family to be in charge of one thing. “Running a small business, a family business, there’s plenty to keep you awake,” CEO Thomas Neese Jr. told Our State in 2013. Back then, he was worried about corporate competitors and a shift in the marketplace, but planned to keep the company in the family. “After so many generations, you don’t want to be the one that gets it wrong,” he said. At the time, his son Tommy III and daughter Andrea Neese Pegram ran the company with him as co-presidents, although Pegram left that position in January 2016 after 29 years, according to her LinkedIn and corporate filings.

Still, change almost always comes, even for the stuff that your grandparents used to love. Duke’s Mayo was bought by a private equity fund in 2019. Krispy Kreme was subsumed by a German conglomerate in 2016 before (once again) going public in 2021. Bojangles keeps yo-yoing between private equity firms. Sure, Cheerwine (which was also first sold in 1917, the same year as Neese’s) is still family-owned. So is Cook Out. But when something become beloved, it also becomes a brand, which becomes valuable, which means it gets surrounded by the storm clouds of investment. One family’s business can quickly became part of another corporation’s portfolio.

So when will Neese’s come back? Who’s in charge? Where will it be made? Will the wax paper wrapper be replaced by something else? All unclear for now. “We believe the White family is the right fit to carry our family sausage business forward and build upon its legacy for generations to come,” said Tommy Neese III, who now, seemingly, becomes the last Neese to independently run Neese’s Sausage. Whether that matters is up to you.