ROBERTSDALE — Many children grow up working for their parents' business, spending summers in their teen years earning their keep and gaining real-world experience.

Not everyone's summer jobs include hand-grinding meat into sausage links, and not everyone returns home from college to take the whole ordeal over.

Erin Childress Salyers has worked at Farm Fresh Meats on and off her entire life, doing just that. After high school, she moved to Tuscaloosa in 2005 to attend the University of Alabama, where she graduated in 2009 and continued to live there until 2016, when her father, Chuck Childress, was looking to retire.

"I had a great job up there, but my dad was ready to retire and I did not want to see this place just go away, be sold off and potentially turned into a gas station or a CVS or something like that," Salyers said. "My husband and I moved down here back home and decided to keep it in the family, and we just stay rocking and rolling all the time."

She is the third-generation owner of Farm Fresh Meats. Joy and Paul Childress started the Robertsdale business, a full-scale meat market and butcher shop, in 1976. Fifty years later, much of the family continues to work in the business, including her brothers and her husband's family, along with a crew of around eight employees.

Farm Fresh Meats carries beef, pork and poultry, from hickory smoked bacon that can be sliced to order to different cuts of steak, chicken thighs, breasts and wings. They also process various types of wild game, including venison, elk, antelope, alligator, bear, duck and goose.

The shop is also known for making around 30 different types of sausages, processing and preparing in-store every Wednesday morning. They still make sausages the old-fashioned way: scooping the meat into a grinder, which goes through a stuffer where it's pumped out into links made by hand before being hung on a rack and taken into the smokehouse to be smoked.

While they make many types of sausages, their most popular by far, according to Salyers, is pineapple pepper jack.

"When we started making that, which was probably I would say six or seven years ago, it just took off," Salyers said. "Out of 30 different types of sausage that we make, we sell 10 times more pineapple pepper jack than we do of anything else, even our German sausage, which is very, very well-known throughout the community."

The butchery has provided the sausages for the Elberta German Sausage Festival, held twice a year on the last Saturday of March and October, since 1979. Salyers said that in total, they make around 10,000 pounds of sausage for that one-day event.

Everything is sourced from local farms, with no antibiotics, hormones, stabilizers or any type of color or dye used in the products.

With Fresh Farm Meats reaching its 50th anniversary, Salyers called it an accomplishment but said she couldn't do it on her own, crediting her team in helping provide the quality products and customer service that people shopping in the meat industry deserve.

"I think people will keep coming back because we have been here for 50 years and we just continuously give that great customer service as well as a really good product," Salyers said.

Want to go? Farm Fresh Meats, located at 22057 Highway 59 S. in Robertsdale, is open Tuesday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.