RUMFORD — If you live or work in the River Valley there’s a good chance you have stopped for a bite at Volkernick’s Sausage trailer. You can typically find the mobile cart popping up at the Rumford Information Booth parking lot or parked outside spots such as Aubuchon Hardware during peak hours.

Jeremy Volkernick, of Rumford, a full-time firefighter with the Mexico Fire Department, has spent 32 of his 56 years on this earth making sausage — mostly serving up fresh, handmade Polish/Lithuanian and Chorizo sausages.

He tracks his lifetime total with his receipts, and will proudly tell you he is closing in on 13,000 pounds of sausage.

At a customer appreciation day June 26 at Hannaford in Rumford, he vividly recalled how his career in the sausage business began, which was after asking his late great-aunt, Josephine Belskis, how to make the sausage.

Volkernick said he was told, “I’m not going to teach you how to make it, but I’ll give you a list of ingredients of what goes in it.”

A little over two weeks later, his great aunt passed away.

Even with the ingredients, Volkernick said there was no amount listed on how much to use. “I said to my mother, ‘what do I do?'”

He said his dad responded, “You’ve got plenty of time. Play with it.”

So, Volkernick tested the sausage recipe on his family members.

“Twelve pounds was the first official batch that I made for my family,” he said. ‘We did it on a frying pan in the house.”

His father liked that first batch. “I was smart enough to write everything (in the recipe) down,” he said. “That was in 1994.”

Volkernick then called the state, where the first inspector put him in touch with Arnold Luce of Luce’s Meats. He said Luce told him they could work together but only on the condition it was done on their premises. That meant a 62-mile trip to North Anson.

“They used to do my sausage. I would go up there and make it up there, 100 to 300 pounds at a time. Then I used to come back to my house (in Rumford) and sell it out of a freezer,” said Volkernick.

He said the process of coming up with a label took a couple of months. That was followed by an inspection from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He got the OK, but had to change the label, which said Lithuanian-style sausage.

“(The inspector) said I couldn’t use the word ‘style.’ He said I had to put Polish Lithuanian Brand. Then I had to specify the ingredients, and I said I had spices that I didn’t want to tell anybody,” Volkernick said. “He said I had to list my pepper and my salt, and garlic, but the other, just put spices.”

After that, he went full-tilt into making the sausages. When his sons, Trevor and Colby, were born, though, he decided to close up.

“After that, about six or seven years later, I said I wanted to do this again,” he said.

This time, Volkernick was interested in doing a food truck and found someone who could manufacture a food truck to specifications. He said he tried to get a loan from area financial institutions and was denied, so he had to pull out funds from his 401K. He paid a little over $41,000 cash for his food truck.

Today, Volkernick makes his sausage in the food truck where state inspectors can “watch me make it.”

He said he buys all his products locally from Naples Packing Co. of Mexico.

Volkernick has been working with his son, Colby, 24, since the food truck started six years ago.

They have a relatively new product called the Chorizo burger — described as not too hot, but a little spicy with a hint of taco flavor.

“I’ve only been doing that for about three years,” he said, “but I’m more of a Polish Lithuanian person, not a Mexican. But people like that spicy stuff. They like it,” he said.”

Setting his menu prices for this season was a challenge, especially with the fuel prices going up and down.

“Green peppers are now $55 a case, about 24 peppers. A year ago, that was probably $23 a case,” Volkernick said. “The onions and the meat are fluctuating. The only thing I went up on my price was hash because the price of potatoes went up.”

Volkernick said the food truck is “more like a hobby,” but he makes enough to pay his sons when they work.

Colby likes working with his dad. “Keeps me out of trouble,” he joked.

The hardest part of the job is the cleanup.

“After it’s all done, I take it home and clean the grill; spit shine them really good,” Volkernick said. “…That’s a two- to three-hour job. Then you have all the prep work. You’ve got to make the fresh sausage, buy the product and stock the trailer.”

The food truck season runs from May into early November, he said.

It’s long hours, but Volkernick said he would like to do this for maybe another 14 years.

“I do festivals and little functions like this, about 20 events in a season. Business is good, but the economy, it just fluctuates,” he said.