Page 27 - Barbecue News Magazine May 2022

TSS: Is that when you brought the sauce to market?
JG: One of the co-packers I wanted to work with said ingredients don’t matter. All that matters is how many marketing dollars you have. That put a chip on my shoulder. One of our taglines is ‘Our Ingredients Matter.’ All of our products have minimal processing and the best products in the world are made like that. I started bottling the sauce myself and selling it to restaurants, but I saw quickly that this is not a scalable business for me. I finally found a co-packing partner that could meet our quality standards. My wife and I went down on our 15-year wedding anniversary and got our first production run done, and it was one of the best days ever. We sold to a couple of local stores. We launched our website and ba- sically turned our whole house into a distribution center. When the pandemic hit, we were all home anyway and our kids were helping us pack orders, and we would drive to the post office. Then we got a small warehouse and instantly outgrew it. We got into Whole Foods. Just this year, we're really starting to expand out into a lot more stores. Today I think we're in around 3,500 stores, and we have another 3,000 already committed for the first half of next year. So we're growing really fast.
TSS: How did the pandemic affect the business?
JG: Once we saw what was going on with the demand, we knew the supply was going to get constricted. So we invested in all of our hard-to-procure materials, and we brought our bottle produc- tion that was happening in China over here to the U.S., so we wouldn't get caught in all this shipping stuff. We didn't really have any interruptions to our supply chain or operations. With other brands that were off the shelf, stores were looking for good prod- ucts to fill the void and we capitalized on that.
Bachan’s has been successful at digital marketing on social media. (Photo by Wai Chan)
TSS: The first product you brought to market was your origi- nal family recipe. Tell us about your other sauces.
JG: We never want to be a brand that has a million sauces across a bunch of different product categories. We just want to make the
best sauces in the world. We launched a gluten-free sauce be- cause we listened to our customers. We developed that one and put it out to the market and even though it’s a small part of the market, I think it’s underserved. The people that buy it really love it. The next thing we wanted to do since people really wanted some spice was a spicy sauce. We tried all kinds of different chilies and the one that gave the best flavor was fermented red jalapeno. It has a sweet heat that balances with our original for- mulation. At the end of 2021, we launched a yuzu [citrus-flavored] sauce, and I am really proud of that one because I started working on it two years ago. I use it almost every day. It’s really good on a ribeye or a fatty cut. The acid cuts the fat a little bit.
TSS: I am intrigued your sauce is marketed as a barbecue sauce. How has the reception been?
JG: Here in the United States, we have a lot of different barbecue sauces. In Japan, there are different sauces that people barbecue with but primarily, it’s a sauce like this. It's a soy-based sauce with some mirin, some sugar, and some other fresh ingredients added to the sauce. I never wanted this to be like a really obscure prod- uct that would be stuck in the Asian side of the store that people really understand. When I
grew up, my dad had a Weber with charcoal on the patio and we barbecued all the time with a sauce like this. So everything just made sense to bring to mar- ket a Japanese barbecue sauce that didn't exist here
in the U.S. that could also be used for all sorts of other things.
TSS: What is next for the brand and what do you want to do in the next year or two?
JG: We might make one or two more sauces. We’re re- ally thoughtful with our prod- uct innovation, and we want to make something that is special. We don’t want to just put something out. We don’t want to break the trust we have with our cus- tomers. So we’re going to get our core sauces into more stores. We want to make our sauces available to more people.
–
Thank you to Justin for sharing the story behind his
family’s barbecue sauce and discussing how he started Bachan’s Japanese Barbe- cue Sauce. Be sure to check out the brand's products and recipes on their website, bachans.com.
MAY 2022
BarbecueNews.com - 27