About

Ray’s History – How our jerky and sausages business came this far

When we look back to our beginnings, it seems amazing to find that it has been over 15 years since we started this journey. We are just another American hard working couple that followed their dream and is now offering you the end result of that dream. That is the finest quality meat products and specialized best beef jerky, Italian sausage, and various sausage and peppers for your perfect barbecue service and catering.

Who are the people behind Ray’s Own Brand Artisan Jerky and Sausage?

We are both born and raised in San Luis Obispo at sunny California, in the true Cattaneo tradition, where we have a family tree that goes deep in time for more than one century. We decided to set our facility in beautiful and bright Edna Valley, a marvelous way to start the day and go to work every day, and a great inspiration to keep the work going.

We are a two person team that lives in the middle of Edna Valley. We are simple people: a hard working couple, owners of 4 Queensland heelers dogs, 5 cats, 40 chickens (and counting), also 1 horse. In our garden we have over 250 roses and a multitude of oak and redwood trees that Ray started from scratch. Nina loves to garden in her side of the property which is more English while she smells the fresh combination of lavender and roses. In the morning, they love the garden smell mixed with the smell of the jerky and sausages that slowly cooks in the kitchen.

But this simple two person team that for some people were not as remarkable as others, hiked the success mountain and now are even partnering with great international brand such as McLane, DPI HCG, Fulton Bros, JW distributing, and Coastal Distributing, who we are glad to say are taking us all over the world.

We have a slightly different history than other family teams: it is just the two of us. There are no kids to showcase, or long family with Sunday dinners that we have photos of. The only family we had at our side, our parents, have passed away, leaving just us, and our persistence, in the path of creating our own USDA store back in 2001.

The journey of Ray’s Own Brand Artisan Jerky and Sausage

Creating a USDA store from scratch and becoming the best place to buy beef jerky and to order sausage online is not easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to do. Nevertheless, we were able not only to do it, but we even got our 100% approval to open the doors by the USDA right after it was built in 2002, something that not many USDA facilities can say.

With Ray taking over the barbecue food and beef jerky production process, and Nina Marie working on the sales, we were ready to hit the market hard and become best place to buy jerky and your go-to bbq catering in San Luis Obispo and complement a great wine tasting event at Edna Valley. After a couple of years, we were happy to see our products being sold in small regional supermarkets, supermarket franchises, colleges, restaurants, wineries and distributors in the near areas.

Better yet, after 5 years of very hard work and effort, we could see our jerky and sausage products being sold in places like Kroger (Ralphs), Albertsons, Safeway, Food 4 Less, Independent restaurants, Colleges, Cal Poly, Cuesta College, Wineries, Laetitia, Sausalito, Toloso, Firestone, colleges across the country side, and many more businesses toward Napa Valley. Our products were even being sold on tool trucks all around California. Our way was now unstoppable.

With this amazing ride we have had all these years, we are happy to say we are here to offer you the best of us, and with each one of our jerky and sausages products you buy, you are sharing a little bit of our history, so for that we say – thank you.