It’s a safe bet when swinging open the average refrigerator that you’ll find a small army of half-used condiments: ketchup and mustard, barbecue and hot sauces, mayo, salad dressings, and more. Their ages and expirations dates vary, and as time goes on, they’re as likely to be thrown out as they are to be used up.
Two suburban Philly dads want to shake up that scenario — literally.
Delco native Paul Lehmann and Midwest transplant Carl Starkey, coworkers at Westchester’s Westtown School athletics department, got deeply into grilling over the pandemic. They hit the barbecue sauce hard, and the empty squeeze bottles in their recycling multiplied as a result. So the pair started meditating on an idea: “Can you take the water out of sauce?”
In January 2021, they started tinkering in Lehmann’s garage. By June, they were incorporating their new business, AWSM Sauce, which reproduces beloved condiments in space-saving — and arguably earth-saving — powdered form.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/W4H6FC64SZD2NC2WNY7JCEFXHY.jpg)
Pour a packet of AWSM Sauce into a jar of water and shake, and you’ll make 5 ounces of fresh ketchup, honey hickory barbecue, or Chesapeake fire sauce. Starkey and Lehmann, now working full time on this project, have raised $760,000 in funding and are developing more recipes for their lineup. They’re working with a manufacturer in Warminster and have sent out more than 30,000 sample kits since their official launch last May.
The Inquirer talked with the two entrepreneurs about AWSM Sauce’s future flavors, the condiment category’s environmental impact, their recent stint at the Minnesota Twins stadium, and their hopes to break into the Philly sports-concession world.
ADVERTISEMENT
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How is AWSM Sauce made?
Carl Starkey: There’s three steps: We source the dry ingredients, blend and package it, and then sell it.
Paul Lehmann: Everything starts from a powdered ingredient: tomato powder, garlic powder, onion powder. What you realize when you dive into the flavor ecosystem is that any ingredient can be powderized. I wasn’t aware of vinegar powders two years ago, but we obviously work with them. We have a food scientist on our team, and we provide an a formula to our co-packer.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/M5A7MF2WHVFYLJBKVFKSNOAGPU.jpg)
CS: We try to make as much as a clean label as possible. It’s challenging. Our ketchup and fire sauces are gluten-free but the barbecue has a barley base. And the ketchup is vegan, but the barbecue has honey powder. So there’s things on the label that will change we continue to develop, and as customers say, “Oh, I want zero sugar or organic.” Our first goal coming out of the gate was: Can we have a product that yields exactly what they’re expecting in a sustainable format?
I have to ask: Is powdered mayonnaise coming?
PL: Oh man, we wish that we could —
CS: The answer is yes.
PL: Carl says yes and I always say no. We’re working on that. The first step is ranch. We are excited to add the creamy sauces and dressings into our product line. The emulsion — where you need the fats in the oil to create that consistency — it’s a much harder piece.
I use ketchup probably twice a year, so it’s appealing to have it in a smaller quantity. How long does it last once it’s made?
PL: Two months, but if you keep it in the fridge, it can last longer. We say you take the storage out of your fridge and put it in your cabinet. And the cool thing about this is when our when our product line expands, and you got the ranches and the soys and the Japanese barbecue — now when you need that sauce bottle for that specific dish, you can pull it from the cabinet, make it fresh when you want it, and not have that extra half-a-bottle sitting in the fridge.
How bad is mainstream ketchup for the environment?
CS: In 2020, Heinz produced 1 billion single-use squeeze bottles, so that’s 100 million pounds of plastic and it’s 120 million gallons of water being shipped.
PL: For us, it’s about the single-use plastic, but it’s also about the recognizing that sauces are somewhere between 60% and 70% water, depending on the sauce. Our goal is to be a zero-waste condiment. We’ve removed 90 to 95% of the plastic compared to a single-use plastic bottle, and we removed the 100% of the water weight. We’re about a third of the weight [of traditional ketchup].
ADVERTISEMENT
CS: One of the things that I think is important to note is that we’re able to provide sustainable improvements across the entire spectrum: in a home kitchen, a restaurant, and at a stadium. At the stadium level, the value that we’re bringing is that shipped weight/storage side of it. In the home, we’re hitting the plastic because you’re not going to throw away a squeeze bottle.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/5LRZP2PIJRC4VA3JKTEKVV3RBM.jpg)
If you’re in a stadium, you’ve got a gigantic ketchup dispenser. How does it work?
PL: We worked with an industrial design team to create version one of our AWSM Sauce dispensers. Essentially there’s an internal reusable gallon-and-a-half shaking jug. You fill that with 6 cups of water, you add in a larger bag of powder, you shake that up, it goes under the hood, and then the pump goes over it.
We were Minnesota in April for the first 12 home games, up in the Delta 360 club. It was taxing, totally worth it, and super-exciting to see people respond to our product. We displaced Heinz Ketchup.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/SEY4XDRESZCHJLG5NVNZZT2IB4.jpg)
As we think about Philly stadiums, Subaru Stadium for the Union is an interesting one for us. They have sustainability goals, so we hope to connect. It’s a little pie in the sky in some ways, but we’ve also had enough exposure to put us on a decent path. It’s exciting to see where it’s gonna go from here.
"Sauce" - Google News
September 12, 2022 at 08:07PM
https://ift.tt/USNg8JY
2 Philly dads hope to shake up the ketchup biz with AWSM Sauce - The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Sauce" - Google News
https://ift.tt/TZPEsyW
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "2 Philly dads hope to shake up the ketchup biz with AWSM Sauce - The Philadelphia Inquirer"
Post a Comment