Illustration by Britt Spencer
Thank you for using the word “consume,” which caused me to break my usually cerebral countenance and, as my descendants say, LOL. To be sure, most people in St. Louis—as everywhere—likely eat their barbecue sauce on meat, French fries, grilled vegetables, etc. But as your word choice subtly suggests, it would be presumptive to discount the possibility that some sauce fanatics drink it straight from the bottle, inject it intravenously, or use it to baptize their children.
As to the substance of your query, at first I dismissed this claim as apocryphal braggadocio. Then I called my old friend Erol Tan at Sweet Baby Ray’s, the nation’s best-selling sauce brand, and it turns out: “You are correct,” Tan says. “St. Louis does consume more barbecue sauce than any other area in the U.S.” In fact, we’re in first place by a mile. According to data for the entire barbecue sauce category, St. Louisans, per capita, buy nearly twice as much sauce in a year as average Americans. We’re well ahead of such ’cue Meccas as Memphis and Kansas City.
What makes our city so saucy? Louis Maull V, whose family produced the nation’s first commercially bottled barbecue sauce right here in St. Louis, has a theory. In Kansas City, people often precede the word “barbecue” with “let’s go get some.” Here, a more common phrase is “let’s have a barbecue,” where the word is synonymous with cookout. It’s no knock on our fine barbecue joints, but many locals prefer to smoke their own. It’s part of our family-first culture.
“There are people for whom their barbecue sauce recipe is a very central part of their lives,” Maull says. “The best barbecue you can find in St. Louis is not in a restaurant—it’s in your back yard.”
When St. Louisans go to the grocery store before a winter storm, they buy bread, eggs, and milk, because survival apparently depends on French toast. Before a summer weekend, the shopping list is charcoal, pork steaks, and barbecue sauce. “The pork steak is the basis of what makes St. Louis the No. 1 barbecue sauce market,” Maull says. “Now, which retailer is credited with creating the pork steak is not something I’m prepared to comment on.” Don’t sweat it, Louis. That’s a question for another time.
