Kevin Logan, left, and his father Cliff Logan, right, confer in the office of Logan’s Sausage Company, a family-owned Alexandria business that the elder Logan started — in retirement — in the late 1980s. (J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post)

When it comes to business, or any pursuit for that matter, what you don’t do can be just as important as what you do.

Take Cliff Logan, owner and founder of Logan’s Sausage in Alexandria and a 50-year veteran of the food business.

“I am a food nut,” said the sausage king (and not the kind that’s made on Capitol Hill).

Logan, a Pittsburgh-area native, was an ambitious 20-something when was approached in 1977 by visionary supermarket pioneer Israel “Izzy” Cohen, head of the Giant Food chain, the Washington-area grocery business founded by his family.

Cohen was dead-set on building a massive, state-of-the-art meat-cutting plant outside Washington. It was designed to save time — and money — for his in-store butchers by taking 600-pound sides of beef from suppliers and chopping them into ready-to-buy packages of steaks, shanks, roasts, ribs, burgers, briskets, soup bones and what have you.

Cohen asked Logan, his $25,000-a-year troubleshooter, for his opinion.

Armed with an MBA and a head for complex operations, Logan traveled the country, snooping around similar plants and other supermarket chains.

He reported back months later with a simple message: Don’t build it.

Logan’s advice was to ask the suppliers to do the chopping before the meat got to the stores.

“I saved him four cents a pound on the meat buying,” said Logan, 77, sitting in his cluttered office in a low-industrial area in Alexandria with his sons, Cliff III and Kevin. “That’s a lot when you are talking about the volume of meat Giant sold.”

Logan became Giant’s vice president of corporate planning, ran 40-plus grocery stores for Cohen and made enough money to retire in 1986 before he turned 50.

He said the key to running stores was making it easy on the customer. Keep the register lines short, and the meat and produce fresh.

Cohen, a legend in the food industry, died in 1995 at 83. He was a big influence on Logan.

“Izzy was a very good executive, a very unique executive,” Logan said. “He spent a lot of time working with people, a hands-on type of manager. He knew the company. Knew the people. He listened and knew what he didn’t know.”

One thing Logan knows is that he loves the food business, dating back to weekends and summers spent on relatives’ farms in Pennsylvania and New York.

“It’s in my blood,” he said.

It’s in his head, too. He studied agronomy at Penn State. He picked up his MBA at the University of Pennsylvania. He was planning to move to the country and open his own small supermarket after retirement.

He took up sausage instead. Logan’s Sausage is a $10 million-to-$15 million enterprise with 28 employees, six refrigerated delivery trucks and a small manufacturing plant whose $500,000 worth of “cutters” and “stuffers” turn pork, beef and chicken into 3 million pounds of sausage a year.

The company is profitable, although the Logans won’t say how profitable. Each of the three Logans takes a salary, and they all live comfortably in Arlington. Most of the profits are reinvested in trucks and equipment. And they are preparing to move into a much larger factory down the street from Logan’s current location.

The biggest cost is the meat, which comes from around the country but mostly Virginia and the Carolinas. The second-biggest cost is the payroll. Then there are trucks, insurance, sales and lease costs.

On a recent visit, I watched as 120 pounds of pork was dumped into a $175,000 German-made chopper that grinds it in seconds.

Salvador Ferrufino, a 30-year-employee who is the head of production, sprinkles in the spice recipe that turns the ground meat into the tasty sausage. In this case it is chorizo, which also happens to be the company’s most popular item — at 15 percent of sales.

From 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. every weekday, Logan’s 12-man crew creates Italian, breakfast, chorizo, polish and andouille sausages, among many others. In the summer, when demand increases, the sausage-making can take longer and is more intense.

The product is then distributed to grocery stores on Logan’s trucks, and the rest is picked up by restaurants throughout the day. Some sausage is frozen for last-minute orders for restaurants. Everything else leaves the plant within 24 hours and is made to order for each customer. The spread of business is 70 percent to groceries, 30 percent to restaurants.

Logan’s is everywhere: Matchbox Pizza, Ted’s Bulletin, Safeway, Giant (of course), Wegman’s and sandwich shop Taylor Gourmet.

“We have established ourselves with distributors as a local family business,” Cliff said.

Cliff handles overall strategy, creates the recipes and is constantly studying meat prices to find the best buy. Oldest son Cliff III is an attorney who handles the company’s contracts and operations. As director of sales, Kevin is in charge of Logan’s “ground game,” targeting new expansion with food distributors, restaurants and grocery stores.

Cliff’s career arc from suburban Pennsylvania to Washington took him through a military stint in Germany and a job working for a canning company in southeast Pennsylvania in the early 1960s.

“In those days, there were little canning companies dotting the landscape,” Logan said. He was in charge of finding raw food — onions, beans — from New York state, Indiana and elsewhere to be canned. He was only 24 and earning $130 a week.

“It was a responsible job for a young guy,” he said.

He had a knack for spotting business opportunities and bought a five-unit apartment building for extra income.

In 1968, he entered Penn for his MBA, and graduated in 1970. By then, he was married and had a young son. His appetite for the food business led him to the Pathmark grocery chain in New York and eventually to the attention of Cohen in Washington.

I asked Logan how he ended up detouring into the sausage business after retirement instead of his dream of kicking back and opening his own grocery store in Small Town America.

Like most things in business, it was a lark. He bought two chorizo sausage recipes from a guy at a community kitchen in Alexandria back in 1987.

“I found this little sausage guy, sampled the chorizo and I loved it,” he said. “He wanted to go to Miami and open a bodega, and so I bought his two recipes.” He also bought a pickup truck with a refrigerator and three pieces of sausage-making equipment. The total cost was about $40,000.

The big break came right away, when Safeway agreed to put Logan’s wares into 100 of its stores in 1988.

Logan became an entrepreneur and mini-sausage mogul.

He quickly invested $500,000 to build a commercial kitchen, and started producing 20,000 pounds of sausage a week. He bought another truck and another and another.

Logan found employees by scouring the lines at the unemployment office. Revenue went from $100,000 a year to $500,000 a year with Safeway. Magruder’s, Shoppers Food Warehouse, Giant and others followed.

The company now is in 200 stores.

“It was incremental after Safeway,” Logan said. “We grew the business about 10 percent a year. This chain, that chain. Then we made a conscious decision to go into restaurants about five years ago.”

The success secret for Logan’s Sausage is the same its owner had for the grocery business: Keep it simple.

“You take care of the customers,” Logan said. “You make a product that your customer loves and make sure you service them. It’s not complicated.”