Building a New BBQ Line

America Loves BBQ, that’s a fact. When you look at this blog titled America Loves BBQ and see the logo, you might think this is another site all about how to cook BBQ. If that is the case, you are only partially right. This site is about BBQ, but more so, how a guy dreams of a branded line of BBQ products and goes about trying to make it happen.  From talking about it, trying to figure out what it takes, doing something,  to getting the message out.   The following is some of the things I go through to make my dream grow up in smoke!

With 7 generations in the meat business, its no wonder I would up in the meat business. And everyone at the meat company I worked at loved BBQ. Throw in what I saw delivering to BBQ Drive-ins and I’ve seen a whole lot of people BBQn.  From pits, which charcoal or wood, chips, spices, the food being cooked, the way it is served, side dishes and so on, I have a lot of memories.  The world loves talking about BBQ almost as much as they like eating it.   When you see the America Loves BBQ logo, you will know what company those products belong to.

All my products have a few things in common: BBQ Sauce and their taste profile are all similar.  In addition to that, they are relative easy to prepare, additional spices or flavors can be used to satisfy a specific taste and different garnishes can stretch the budget.  My thoughts and progress on how I come up with products, labels and the marketing I use to compete in one of the most popular categories in the grocery store come from everywhere.  The competition selling BBQ Sauce comes from corporate America to other independents like myself armed with just a dream, struggling to get on a shelf and then faced with the reality of getting shoppers to try it.

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America Loves BBQ, when I say it to someone for the first time, I usually get a nod, a smile, a comment about BBQ; no one has said anything negative except they can’t get enough!  The America Loves BBQ logo probable went through 25 revisions to just get to where it is now.  Everything I do is fair game for making it better, more useful or whatever.  I usually will revisit my efforts and over time, try to improve them.  I strongly believe if it is if worth doing, it is worth starting.

America Loves BBQ, the logo, this is the “first final version”.

It looked to me that it will need a lot of BBQ to spread around under this brand name.

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My family has been a great inspiration and help over the years during BBQ Time. I wound up president of  a Chicago meat company for 30 plus years and could always count on my kids to help out on summer holidays as each of our stores were neighborhood happenings at that time.   I thought it was necessary to close early on each summer BBQ holiday so employees and myself could get home to BBQ or to enjoy someone else’s BBQ efforts.  At my house, you didn’t have to call anyone twice to the table.

From the family helping out at work, talking BBQ all day to the holiday meal itself, everyone had their own great feedback at our holiday BBQ’s.  My wife did all the BBQ’n at our house because the kids and myself worked right up to the holiday itself.  The whole family learned quickly what kind of BBQ customers were looking for and would buy, not just sample, but buy!  I left the meat company in 2006 to try my hand at something different.

The first thing I would up doing was creating a branded line of chicken called Love Me Tenders.

www.LoveMeTenders.com

But that’s a different story, this is about working on America Loves BBQ.

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America Loves BBQ

The first product at America Loves BBQ we worked on was our BBQ Sauce.  BBQ Sauce is a very, very competitive category and not exactly very easy to enter.  Most grocers do not want another sauce for the shelf, it just splits their sales into more facings.

But BBQ Sauce we worked on.  It took about 6 months to find our taste profile.  When thenutritional information came in, we were not happy so we changed the formula somewhat.   As we passed it around to friends and businesses for comments, it was obvious we would stick with it.   That BBQ Sauce became our first product and the company’s taste profile, however we still needed to name it.  This proved to be a much harder task then coming up with the taste profile for the sauce.

The name alone stumped us, America Loves BBQ “BBQ Sauce” or maybe America Loves BBQ “Love Sauce,” America Loves BBQ, BBQ Sauce For BBQ Lovers.  We went through lists and lists of names, finally I thought we should start the art work for the BBQ Sauce label hoping the colors, the fonts might give us a clue or just lead us to a name.  But, we went through about 15 label looks and settled on a look without the final name.

The picture below was taken at a rib cooking contest in 1986.  My family knew their BBQ, but they were not judges.  They did have a lot to say about what ever they tasted that day.

The above pictures show you how we named our sauce.  The thoughts that brought the name to be came to me while I was thinking about Labor Day 2007.  I was wondering if we were all going to be around to BBQ since my life did not revolve around working the BBQ holidays anymore.  I didn’t know if all my kids would be around, but sure, Merle will BBQ, its like a family tradition. Yes! Family Tradition; we were throwing out all sorts of different names for our BBQ Sauce, I used “Family Tradition” as a place holder.

This was a logo I pictured in store windows one night.  I called my artist and he put it into action.  My dream is to see it in a few restaurants serving some of our products, grocery stores, on food service trucks one day.  Why not, better than in my closet, gathering dust.