How PS Seasoning turns meat projects into cart-ready recipes
The PS Seasoning smoked venison sausage guide has recently ranked on the first page of Google for its dish (as of July 2026), and its snack sticks, summer sausage, and pepperoni guides have held first-page placement too. The brand traces its roots to a homemade smoker built from an old chest freezer that nearly burned the family's house down, and five Wisconsin facilities later it uses recipes to hand a first-timer the full manual for a day-long meat project with the shopping list built in. It earned a spot in the Recipe Kit case study library, our shelf of working recipe strategies from real food brands.
How does PS Seasoning use Recipe Kit? PS Seasoning runs a 1,012-recipe library of thorough how-to guides; the ones we reviewed each walk a home cook through a full meat-processing project with the exact cures, casings, and seasonings named in the steps. It has published on Recipe Kit since 2021 at a steady pace of roughly five substantial guides a month, turning "how to make" searches into carts of everything the project needs.
The challenge
PS Seasoning is a Wisconsin heritage brand, in business since 1977, that sells the full kit for home meat processing and sausage-making: seasonings and cures, natural and collagen casings, high-temp cheese, smokers, and the hardware that goes with them. It is a brand for the hunter who came home with a freezer of venison and the home cook who decided this is the year they make their own summer sausage. Out of Iron Ridge, PS Seasoning has spent more than four decades supplying that exact ambition.
The story starts with Harold Hanni, who built a homemade smoker out of an old chest freezer and nearly burned his house down in the process, then turned that obsession into a meat-processing business. His son Ken Hanni and Ken's wife Kate established the PS Seasoning name in 1986, and the family operation has since grown into something genuinely large: roughly 80 million pounds of seasoning a year across five Wisconsin facilities, with a catalog of more than 5,000 blends developed by its in-house food scientists, master meat crafters, and culinary team, plus its own customer innovation and testing center.
Their products are not impulse buys. Making snack sticks or dry-cured pepperoni at home is a project, one that requires the right cure, the right casing, the right seasoning, and a genuine willingness to learn the steps. That is a high bar to clear on a product page alone, and it is the exact bar the recipe library was built to clear.
The system: the recipe is the project manual
Most recipes tell you how to cook dinner. PS Seasoning's best content teaches you how to complete a multi-hour project, and the products you need are woven into the instructions rather than bolted on at the end.
Their Snack Sticks 101 guide is the model. It walks a first-timer through grinding, seasoning, stuffing, and smoking venison or beef sticks, and along the way it names the exact Willie's Snack Stick Seasoning, the casings, the high-temp cheddar, and the encapsulated citric acid the process calls for. The same is true of their Summer Sausage 101 walkthrough, their venison bacon, and their fermented, dry-aged homemade pepperoni. Each one is a complete education in a project, and each project has a specific shopping list embedded in it.
The recipe card on PS Seasoning's Snack Sticks 101 guide (live, July 2026)
The library sits at 1,012 live recipes, built up over five years and still publishing roughly five substantial guides a month. The cadence looks modest next to a brand pumping out weeknight dinners, and that is the point. These are not quick posts. They are thorough, tested how-to guides for projects that can take a full day, and that depth is why they work.
How Recipe Kit supports the system
The guides we reviewed run on a structured Recipe Kit card, so the cure, the casing, and the seasoning named in the steps link straight to the product page instead of sitting as plain text. The same structure feeds the recipe schema search engines read, and that structured data is part of what helps these guides surface in search. The smoked venison sausage guide, for one, has recently held first-page placement for the term (as of July 2026). A cook following the walkthrough for their first batch of snack sticks can go from step to cart without leaving the page.
PS Seasoning has run that setup since 2021, more than five years, which makes this one of the longest-tenured libraries we host. A first batch of snack sticks is rarely the end of it. The cook who nails those comes back for summer sausage, then ring bologna, then their own bacon and pepperoni, and each new project is a fresh list of cures, casings, and seasonings pulled straight from the recipe card.
In their words
Your smoked venison sausage guide ranks number one on Google for that term, and your snack sticks, summer sausage, and pepperoni guides are on the first page too. Walk me through how one of those deep how-to guides gets made: who writes it, how you pick which project earns a full walkthrough, and what you think you do that the hunting and outdoor sites do not.
[Awaiting PS Seasoning's answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
How deliberately do you think about recipes as SEO? Ranking for a dish like harissa chicken catches someone right before they buy the spice, and I am curious if that is explicit strategy for you or just a happy side effect.
[Awaiting PS Seasoning's answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
How do recipes fit into the bigger picture of growing PS Seasoning?
[Awaiting PS Seasoning's answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
Lessons for spice and seasoning brands
The moves that travel from PS Seasoning to other seasoning brands on Shopify, and to any brand whose products require real effort to use well.
- If your product is a project, write the project manual. The SKUs that take real effort to use well are the ones that most need a guide, because a thorough walkthrough removes the fear that keeps a shopper from starting at all.
- Embed the shopping list in the steps. PS Seasoning's Snack Sticks 101 guide names the exact Willie's Snack Stick Seasoning, the casings, the high-temp cheddar, and the encapsulated citric acid at the moment each is used, so buying the kit is the method rather than an upsell.
- Choose depth over volume. PS Seasoning publishes only about five substantial guides a month, yet at 1,012 recipes over five years the library out-earns a feed of thin weeknight posts, because each guide teaches a hard skill worth trusting the brand for.
- Own the "how to make" query. The guides are built to meet someone typing "how to make venison snack sticks," the exact moment a project begins, and the brand that answers wins the whole basket of cures, casings, and seasoning that follows.
- Structure the library as a project ladder. PS Seasoning pairs Snack Sticks 101 with Summer Sausage 101, venison bacon, and homemade pepperoni, so a cook who nails the first batch has an obvious next project, and each one is a fresh list of cures and casings. Teaching well is a retention strategy, not just an acquisition one.
Turn your catalog into a library of product demonstrations
Publish structured recipes on Shopify, connect each dish with the products used to make it, and show shoppers what your products can actually do.
