SALEM – One day, Mike White was standing in front of his refrigerator looking for the perfect salsa, but couldn’t find it, so he decided to try his hand at creating his own.
“I had a ton of salsas in the refrigerator and was hesitant to go to the grocery store to buy one,” White said. “I wanted to try different salsas and couldn’t decide what to put on my food, plus I had a bunch of open bottles. Then I realized I needed to make my own salsa, so I started researching the market and the feasibility of starting a salsa.”
White moved to the Salem area with his family in 2013 when his wife got a job with the state and he transferred to a bank from Portland.
He started experimenting with different salsas and doing research, until he finally created his perfect recipe.
“We tend to use the sweet and tangy, Kansas City-style salsa the most,” White said. “It’s thicker and tomato-based. We make a good blend; it’s a good salsa.”
White decided to give it a try and entered a sweet and sour sauce called ‘Sweet Lady Love’ into the 31st Annual American Royal World Series BBQ Sauce Contest. This contest is the largest barbecue sauce competition in the world. She finished in first place, beating out more than 300 entrants from around the world.
“The first step is to have a good brand if you want to have a good business, so I came up with a killer name that no one was using,” White said. “I started experimenting with different sauces, doing some research. I tried a sweet and sour one and then a hot one.” What I did was create a website, went to the grocery store to find bottles of barbecue sauce, put a fake label on them, and uploaded them to my website to make it look legitimate.
After her success at the barbecue contest, White knew she was onto something and officially launched her product in the summer of 2018. She started spreading the word about her sauce and visiting farmers markets. He got to the point of going to seven farmers’ markets a week.
Eventually, he was able to get the BBQ sauce into grocery stores and started getting online orders.
The whole family got involved in the business, and now Best Damn BBQ Sauce is found in 500 supermarkets nationwide, including Albertson’s, Safeway, Market of Choice, Target, Roth’s, and other chains in Texas.
The company uses an outside manufacturer to make the sauce, but the long-term goal is to build a manufacturing facility in the area, so it’s currently raising funds to achieve this. They’ve raised $500,000 so far and their goal is to reach $2 million.
“I want sustainable, healthy growth; I don’t want to be in every supermarket overnight,” White said. “I’d rather reach 400 stores a year. There are about 40,000 locations where our sauce can be available, so we’re just trying to maintain steady, healthy growth. The goal is to become the next iconic American barbecue brand.”
