Seemore Meats & Veggies, a women-owned operation, has a creative lineup of flavorful vegetable-infused sausages dedicated to original, premium ingredients and sustainable practices. We sat down with founder and fourth-generation butcher Cara Nicoletti to get the inside scoop on how the brand was born and why sustainability and women’s involvement are key to the success of the business.
What was the inspiration for the brand and how did it come to fruition?
I’ve actually been making these sausages for about 10 years in other people’s butcher shops around Brooklyn. Sustainable meat-eating is really important to me, so I naturally gravitated towards sausage making when I took up butchery. Sausages are one of the oldest sustainability-minded foods in that they make whole-animal butcher feasible. A big part of eating meat responsibly is eating less of it, so I started packing my sausages with fresh vegetables and translating them into fun flavors like loaded baked potato and chicken soup. People kept buying them because they tasted really good, the fact that they were eating less meat—sometimes up to 60% less than a regular sausage—was just an added bonus!
Your slogan is “By women, for everyone”—can you elaborate a little on how that’s a central part of the Seemore brand?
It would be impossible to ignore the fact that we’re a bunch of women making sausages—it’s too ripe for jokes to ignore. But the “For Everyone” is something that’s really important to me. In the 10+ years I was working in butcher shops something that frustrated me was that I felt like I was selling humanely raised, pastured, grass-fed, local meat to the same demographic over and over again because the cost was prohibitively high. I wanted to find a way to get this good meat to more people, and veggie-forward sausages were my way to do that. We might not be the cheapest option in the sausage section, but our meat is humanely raised and each link is packed with vegetables which means it not only has 10g of protein, but other benefits like fiber, calcium and Vitamin C. It’s a really easy and affordable way to feed good food to the people you love.
How did you come up with the name?
Seemore is named after my grandpa, Seymour, who taught me how to make sausages. He was a butcher, like his father before him, and his father-in-law before him, so I’m the 4th generation of butchers in the family. He’s been my biggest supporter and inspiration—he’s 90 and we still talk almost every day. We tweaked his name as a play on the outdated idea that “you don’t want to see how the sausage gets made.” Transparency is really important to us, in the ingredients we use and the people we work with–from pork and vegetable suppliers to box companies and cold-storage warehouses. With us, you will want to see how the sausage gets made, and you’ll still want to eat it after you do!
Carbon neutrality and sustainability seems to be a key tenant of the business, can you speak on that a little?
It is! The carbon footprint created by the meat industry is an issue that everyone is talking about these days, but something people think less about is the footprint created by all the little things that go into manufacturing, like the machinery that mixes the sausages, the lights in the meat plant, the trucking of ingredients. We’re working with our manufacturers to calculate the emissions caused by our production and manufacturing, and then working with a company called Carbon Credit Capital to offset those emissions through carbon credits. Carbon credits are generated from projects around the world that pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or keep them out altogether—it’s pretty cool!
We aren’t fully carbon neutral and there are still many things we need to improve on–we want to be fully transparent that this is our starting point and we’re committed to improving our sustainability efforts as the company (hopefully!) grows.
What do you want Murray’s customers (and sausage lovers in general) to know about Seemore?
First and foremost you don’t have to love vegetables to love Seemore. Even if you’re a major carnivore and very traditional about your sausage preferences you will still like these! Trust me, my dad won’t go within 100 yards of a beet and he eats our La Dolce Beeta sausage regularly. In developing these recipes, it was really important to me that texturally and taste-wise they still satisfy like the classic, so that even hardcore carnivores will buy them over and over again.
