#longganissa

Merci's Vigan Food Enterprises is a family-owned business in the Philippines that supplies special Filipino foods to high-end wholesalers locally in the Philippines including gourmet & specialty food retailers, supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, etc.

How Merci's Vigan Food Enterprises Came To Be

Vigan is the capital of Ilocos Sur, a province in northern Luzon in the Philippines. The creator and proprietor of this business is Mercedes A. Favis-Guico, M.D. She was born and grew up early in her life in Vigan. Her father was Mariano B. Favis, Sr., M.D. Both of them practiced as country physicians in Vigan for a very long time.

Merci also practiced as a physician in both Manila as well as Binan, Laguna, both in the Philippines, as well as many decades in California, USA.

Merci always enjoyed cooking. She formally took up culinary arts, and eventually she used her grandmother's (by the way her grandmother's name was also Mercedes so she was called Lola Merced) original recipe for Vigan longganisa (Philippine sausage speicifically known as being from Vigan, Ilocos Sur) and started making and cooking for family & friends. Everyone enjoyed it so much that eventually they persuaded her to start a business.

This is how Merci's Vigan Food Enterprises came to be. Besides longganisa, we also offer other special Vigan food products just like bagnet (Ilocano-style pork rind).

About Our Longganisa

There are generally 2 kinds of Philippine longganisa, and they differ by their main taste: sweet vs. regular (unsweetened). Sweet-tasting longganisa are pretty sweet, and regular longganisa is neither sweet nor sour. They are simply more garlicky in taste.

Every community/locality in the Philippines have their own favorite variation of longganisa. For example, longganisa from the province of Pampanga is the sweet kind. Vigan longganisa is of the regular kind and is popularly known as one of the best of all longganisa.

My great-great grandmother's recipe, and our main product, is the best of all Vigan longganisa, at least according what we hear from everyone we know who has tasted it. I truly believe this because I have been eating Vigan longganisa all my life, and now that my mother came up with our product, I can personally attest to this.

More To Come...

My name is Henry, and I am Merci's youngest son. I have recently established a website for this business, and am working on the very first version of webpages that will be deployed to it sometime this summer 2014. It will be in http://MercysViganFoodEnterprise.com (please note that in this URL, Merci is spelled as Mercy and Enterprise is singular so with no last 's').

Please stay tuned as we will provide you more information about its products, more history, and other very useful information. For now, we invite you to give us feedback from this blog.

If you have tasted our product(s), please feel free to let us know how you liked it (them) as well as where and when you did.

Thank you,