Our prayers have been answered: After five long, hard years without Sister Schubert’s sausage wrap rolls, the savory treats are officially back on shelves.
“You asked, we listened,” said the company in an Instagram post announcing the product’s return. The post generated over 12,000 likes and comments in the vein of “all is right with the world, Christmas morning especially!” and “Sister, never do that to us again.”
For many Southerners, pulling a tray of the golden-brown, pillowy yeast rolls from the oven was a long-standing family tradition. Pigs in a blanket by any other name, the rolls graced tables at tailgates, potlucks, and holidays.
The Alabama-based baked goods company discontinued the rolls in November 2021, citing low sales. In their place, Sister Schubert’s introduced sausage pinwheels, but they never gained as loyal a following as the original. “I always kept some in the freezer just in case, as a true Southerner does,” says Jean Clare Dickerson of Hot Springs, Arkansas, who had served the sausage rolls on Christmas mornings for over twenty-five years before they were discontinued. “They were a life saver.”
Patricia Barnes, the woman we can thank for bringing Sister Schubert’s rolls to the masses, started out selling her grandmother’s recipe from her house in Troy, Alabama, in 1989. She opened a commercial bakery about thirty minutes away in Luverne a few years later, and though she sold the business to the Marzetti Company in 2000, her rolls are still made in the same spot today. In 2016 she told a Baton Rouge magazine that the facility makes nine million rolls a day.
“I was put on this earth to bake bread,” she has said about her lifelong passion. “Any home. Anywhere. I want my rolls to bring people together. And doesn’t our world need a whole lot more of that.”
For now, the sausage rolls are only available in Publix’s freezer sections across the Southeast. But they’ll hit shelves in Walmart, Kroger, and Food Lion starting in September and October, just in time for holiday traditions to continue.