If heat and humidity have left sales stagnating, rejuvenate your gourmet food business with a sizzling summer promotion for barbeque sauces and BBQ-related gifts. It’s just the spark needed to ignite sales throughout your complete gourmet food and gift basket line!
The good old summertime allows us to direct marketing efforts toward the popularity of backyard barbecuing and grilling outdoors with family and friends. Extra momentum gained now can carry you successfully through the fall sales season, with promotions geared at back-to-school barbecues, football tailgate parties and cook-outs, and then eventually through yearend for a much-anticipated “Red Hot Holiday Season!”
BBQ’s universal appeal, as well as the countless barbeque/grilling-related products being offered, has given rise to a gourmet foods category that’s quite prolific. Moreover, blending new available items with existing product lines and implementing a cohesive promotional strategy can be overwhelming. So, specialize! Discover new grill and barbeque seasonings, sauces, and tools you’d like to incorporate, like specialty items from family-owned and operated manufacturers, Crazy Jerry’s, Inc., Jimmy O’s Texas Marinades, and others for example. Choose only products that have unique selling points, like “catchy name, appealing taste or savory, one-of-a kind flavor,” and you’ll end up with popular new gift items that are fun to sell and easy to market.
Interest in ethnic cuisine continues to grow, so also consider sauces and marinades that feature distinct ethnic influences and flavors. Illustrating this point, Big Acres Gourmet Sauces’ latest addition is an award-winning Chipotle Peanut Sauce, featuring a unique blend of both Latin and Asian flavors that’s great for grilling or baking. The barbeque sauce most recently introduced by Pyrate Isle Sauces LLC, is infused with papaya fruit, a true Caribbean favorite that’s also been used for thousands of years in South America as a meat tenderizer.
Another trend in the barbeque sauce market has been the integration of unusual, and seemingly far-fetched, flavor combinations. Pappy’s Moonshine Madness Barbecue Sauce from Kentucky BourbonQ has the flavor you’d expect from a gourmet barbecue sauce, with an added nip of Pappy’s XXX White Lightnin’ hooch from the hills of Kentucky. Other liquor, like whiskey, tequila, and rum are also used to spice up barbecue sauce recipes, as well as create “buzz” about the product, so to speak!
A variety of fruits, in combination with mainstream spices, are also used in sauces to create rich flavors, natural sweetness, and appealing textures that only fresh fruit can offer. A Perfect Pear from Napa Valley obviously features pears in their Roasted Pepper & Pear Vinaigrette, Pear Chipotle Grill Sauce, and other specialty items in their product line. WAAZUU! Bar B.Q. Sauce offers “Bar B. Q. Sauce with a Kick” in varieties that have boysenberry, red raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry as primary ingredients, as well as a recent introduction, their mango-sweetened Mango Tango Spicy Gourmet BBQ Sauce .
Of course, original and more traditional flavor enhancers, including hickory, honey and mesquite are still enduring favorites from coast to coast. Strawberry’s Bar-B-Que Seasonings takes pride in their recipes’ heritage and specializes in keeping things simple and traditional, offering their famous shake-on seasoning in four convenient sizes and two sizes each in their basting sauces. The Austin Spice Company uses no liquid smoke or flavor additives, but only genuine mesquite-roasted peppers in their sauces for an authentic smoky flavor that could only have originated in Texas! Family-owned and operated supplier, Texas Firehouse, LTD., invites us, in a sense to gather around the dinner table to enjoy “real Texas eating” and the timeless taste of their Mesquite Bar-B-Que Sauce, an old family recipe with a tad of brown sugar and honey added for a sweet boost that enhances the flavor of beef, pork, fish or poultry dishes.
Barbecuing is so popular because it combines our love of the outdoors with our love of convenience. Grilling outdoors has long been considered an easy way to entertain with great tasting food and little clean up! Consumers today looking for the latest grilling gadgets, as well as convenience features in their BBQ products and tools have a plethora of choices now available on the market. Mr. Mist, Inc. markets a sauce, Remington’s Grilling Sauce & Marinades, that comes packaged with a trigger spray-nozzle, allowing direct spray-basting of grilled and smoked foods. A concept the company says was inspired by the “pros,” the “spray-baste” method keeps grilled foods moist and flavorful while adding the benefits of ease and simplicity to the grilling process. Another, BBQr’s Delight has handy, variety sampler gift sets that include 20 single use sized packets of their real wood, smoke-flavoring pellets, a product that allows the speed and convenience of gas grilling, while incorporating the flavor of real wood smoke.
And in the seemingly-alternate universe of BBQ-Land, there is no place where America’s passion for barbeque and the novelty of barbequing as a fun outdoor activity, is more visible than in the unique and creatively-descriptive names in the vast assortment of barbeque, grilling sauces and products marketed from coast to coast. For example, Mo Hotta Mo Betta features Scorned Woman Fiery BBQ Sauce in their sauce and hot sauce collection, along with the claim that hell hath no fury like, the proverbial “scorned woman!”
Here, we have offered just a small taste of the available choices in barbecue sauces, grilling sauces, marinades, BBQ-related products, etc., as well as the vendors and manufacturers, that continue to “season” our lives and food shared with family and friends at summer backyard barbecues and cook-outs year round.
A more complete list of product sources can be found on the FGmarket Barbecuing – Grilling Gourmet Foods pages. Take an interactive tour of the online trade show located at FGmarket.com anytime, open 24-hours a day for your convenience.
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