The boss of barbeque sauce has moved to the Tisdale area.
Mike and Jill Haynes are the two entrepreneurs behind two barbeque sauces: Snowball Effect and Snowball’s Chance in Hell. Together they are called the Boss of Sauce. The Hayneses recently moved from Victoria, B.C. to four acres near Crooked River.
“It just got too busy and we had just had enough of the traffic,” Mike said.
“It was just kind of go, go, go in the city and we decided we’d rather have some space,” Jill, who was raised in Melfort, added.
Snowball Effect starts off with a sweet flavour, then smoky before ending with a slight bite. Its sibling, Snowball’s Chance in Hell, is much the same, but it has more peppers to give it an extra bite. The sauces also work as marinades and in dishes like pulled pork.
From mason jars to production
The first sauce, Snowball Effect, began life as a baked bean/chili recipe.
“We went to a couple of chili cookoffs in Victoria and we won them both, so I thought I’d take out all of the chili and then make it into a sauce,” Mike said.
For around eight years after that, Mike made the sauce and put it into mason jars, giving it away to friends.
“Everyone said, ‘you should do something with it.’ I finally broke down.”
So Mike went and talked to other people in the Victoria region that had made barbeque sauces. They pointed him to a fellow in Burnaby, B.C. that had a manufacturing line that produced his – and other people’s – food products. Mike went to him and the manufacturer told him they could do something for him.
In the kitchen, it took Mike three days to make the sauce. The manufacturer then created a recipe for the purpose of mass manufacturing, reducing the process to an hour.
“He kept sending me samples and samples and samples and by sample #5, he got it right.”
The manufacturer then measures the nutritional value, performs tests to ensure the sauce is gluten-free and to measure the pH to ensure the sauce will last in the bottles, and sources ingredients and bottles.
Mike went to Burnaby for the first run. With production set to begin the next morning, the sample was way out of whack.
“I took the sample to the hotel and sat there with a spoon I stole from Denny’s and tried to figure out what was wrong with it – and it turned out it was the salt content.”
When the sauce is done, it’s then stored in a warehouse.
Distributing the sauce
Then it came time to get the sauce on store shelves. Back then, Mike was a plumber, while Jill was working as a teacher in Kazakhstan.
Jill said the store situation was different around Victoria, with many different small independent grocery chains made up of only a few stores. So Mike took the direct approach.
“He just went to stores and said, ‘I made this barbeque sauce, do you want to put it in your store?’”
Doing that, the couple managed to get around 30 stores carrying the sauce.
Then, while at a trade show, a distributor approached them. After a while, they switched to another distributor, which got them from 40 to 150 stores. All were in B.C.
Outside of B.C., they also sold the sauce online.
When the Haynes’ moved to Saskatchewan, they talked to local stores
“Every time we go into a little town and notice a co-op or a corner store or something we just go, ‘want to give this a whirl?’” Mike said.
Now Beeland Co-op’s Tisdale Food Store and Arborfield Store, PJ’s One Stop in Bjorkdale and Prairie North Co-op’s Melfort Food Store sell the sauce. Jill said they have reordered the sauce a few times now.
“It seems to sell better out here than it does in B.C., that’s for sure.”
The future
Now, the couple is trying to get the sauce into the Federated Co-op system. The next barbeque sauce assessment they will conduct will be in February of next year.
Jill said she believes the Prairies have more of a barbeque culture than B.C.
“I want it in stores in Saskatchewan and Alberta so that we can stop online shipping to these places and because that’s where I really think it needs to be.”
Mike is also working on sauce #3, a sweet Thai chili sauce they’ll call Snowball’s Brother from Another Mother. He said the recipe has gone through the tests it needs to go though before manufacturing, but now they have to save up money to manufacture enough for all of the stores. The hope is to start production in the summer.
“Since I’ve started, everybody I’ve talked to says three skews is where you want to be.”
It’s also a goal of the couple to keep the sauce affordable.
“We want to be under $7,” Mike said. “We don’t want to be the specialty $10-$12 bottle of sauce.”
The sauces will also receive a taste test from the American Royal Barbeque Association, where they’ll test and rank around 450 sauces, some of which are made by famous world-class chefs.
They also took the sauce to Dragon’s Den, where the investors asked for lots of bottles of the sauce, but decided not to do anything with it. The couple said they have thought since then how they’d react if an investor decided to buy the product.
“I like being in control of it,” Jill said. “I think we’re always going to want to be in control of it, as opposed to doing something like that, where you get the investors and they take over. I like being able to make our silly little posts on Facebook and do whatever we do the way we want to do it.”
