By WADE DANIELS

Staff Reporter

Jordan Monkarsh started selling his Jody Maroni’s sausage sandwiches from a single pushcart on the Venice boardwalk in 1979, barking at and cajoling passersby to try his food. His “carney” style was custom made for the boardwalk, and Monkarsh soon became a well-known fixture.

The base of operations remains in Venice, although Monkarsh’s pushcart has been replaced by a boardwalk storefront and his offices are a couple of blocks away. But his scope of operations is now nationwide and growing fast.

“I went from having a sausage cart to having a (national) empire with a USDA factory, where there are inspections every day,” Monkarsh said of his Los Angeles operations, where up to two tons of sausage are manufactured each day.

Monkarsh’s company, Jody Maroni’s Italian Sausage Kingdom Inc., churns out more than 20 different varieties of gourmet sausage. The varieties include such exotic offerings as Yucatan Chicken and Duck Sausage (with cilantro and beer) and Tequila Chicken Sausage (with jalapenos, corn and lime), in addition to more “traditional” sausages like bratwurst.

Jody Maroni’s generated more than $4 million in revenues in 1997, and more than $5 million is projected this year. About 60 percent of the company’s revenues come from its two company-owned sandwich stands the one on the Venice boardwalk and another at Universal CityWalk.

The rest of its revenues come from three LAX sandwich stands operated under a licensing agreement by Bethesda, Md.-based Host Marriott Services Corp., from mail-order customers who receive their sausages via express mail, and from wholesale sales to food distribution companies. These companies sell Jody Maroni’s sausages to restaurants and grocery stores across the country, including the 85-store Trader Joe’s Markets chain.

“Sausage is a salt-of-the-earth food, and I think everybody can find something they like in the kinds of sausages we make,” said Monkarsh, who invented the name Jody Maroni because it has a better ring than his own name.

The projected revenue growth is based primarily on Monkarsh’s plan to open as many as eight more sandwich stands this year in Southern California. An even larger part of the growth plan calls for opening storefronts in the Midwest and elsewhere, and that expansion is being coordinated through Jody Maroni’s licensing deal with Host Marriott.

That company has contracts with some 75 U.S. airports to coordinate and operate food service at their terminals. It opened the three LAX Jody Maroni’s stands in 1996, and intends to open sandwich outlets in eight more airports around the country this year.

“We could easily be opening a dozen a year,” said Bob Elling, a Host Marriott official who participated in the licensing of Jody Maroni’s.

Host Marriott also operates food parks at malls, and likewise intends to open Jody Maroni’s stands in an as-yet-undetermined number of those venues around the country.

Elling said Host Marriott routinely cuts licensing deals to operate regional or local restaurants at one or two of its airport or mall venues, but few restaurant concepts are chosen for inclusion in venues nationwide.

Jody Maroni’s is one of those concepts, Elling said, because the company offers quality, gourmet food that can be consumed at point of purchase or easily carried away. In addition, the food can be prepared and sold within a relatively small space (200 to 300 square feet).

Monkarsh said he has broadened his product line to appeal to a national market. This was mainly because the company until recently had focused almost exclusively on “exotic” sausages and offered little for “conservative” sausage eaters.

“People in California are adventurous and like to try newer things, but I came to the realization that people in the Midwest like their bratwurst and might not touch the exotic sausages,” said Monkarsh.

Merrill Schindler, editor of the Zagat’s Los Angeles Restaurant Guide, is among the Jody Maroni’s fans. For three successive years, Zagat has declared that Jody Maroni’s has the “Best Fast Food in L.A.”

“In the same way that Wolfgang Puck showed that there is a world of possibilities for what can be done with pizza, Jody Maroni’s has done this for the sausage,” said Schindler.

Back in 1979, when Monkarsh first started his quest to become top dog in the sausage world, he offered only an Italian sausage sandwich with saut & #233;ed bell peppers and onions piled on top. It was the same Italian sausage Monkarsh made for years as part of his chores at his father’s Universal City butcher shop, where he worked as he was growing up in the 1960s.

From his cart, Monkarsh employed an aggressive “hey, you!” style of selling to passersby that established him as a local personality and was a strong draw for customers on the boardwalk, Schindler said.

Monkarsh said he insists on retaining a “carney” atmosphere around his outlets, and even today he personally teaches new hires how to bark at and cajole people into trying a free sausage sample and possibly buy a sandwich.

After a couple of years of selling only Italian sausage sandwiches, Monkarsh began toying with the idea of expanding his cart’s menu. He looked back to his experience working at gourmet food shops and delis while studying literature at UC Berkeley, and sought to fuse sausages with some of the gourmet entrees he had come to know.

“I wanted to take the entrees and their complex flavors and put them into a sausage format,” said Monkarsh.

The company’s first step toward entering larger markets came with a 1990 contract to supply sausages and hot dogs to food stands at Dodger Stadium. A consultant for the stadium pitched the idea of selling Jody Maroni’s at baseball games to add some “local flavor” to the concessions, said Rich Leivenberg, Jody Maroni’s marketing manager.

“We had had some good write-ups and had a good reputation, but the Dodger Stadium deal gave us some credibility in the food industry,” Leivenberg said “That was like plunging into the major leagues.”

From there, the company was sought out for similar supplying agreements at venues like the L.A. Memorial Coliseum and the Los Angeles Sports Arena, as well as deals with food distributors that supplied its sausages in restaurants and stores across the country.

Since starting his business, Monkarsh has seen other companies introduce gourmet sausages with exotic flavors, trying to mimic his winning formula. He said there is little he can do to combat that, except maintain consistent quality. His competitive advantage is Jody Maroni’s two L.A.-area sausage stands, which serve as a proving ground.

“With our stands, we have a direct line to our customers to test products,” Leivenberg said.