This Old-School BBQ Sauce Brand Has Been A Southern Favorite Since 1935

When you walk into a grocery store these days, you're typically faced with a wall of barbecue sauce options of varying quality. But there's one brand that many Southerners are particularly devoted to. Mrs. Griffin's Barbecue Sauce has been around for over 90 years, making it one of the oldest barbecue sauces in America. The sauce combines mustard, tomato paste, vinegar, and spices that include turmeric and garlic powder. 

Mrs. Griffin's started as a home recipe in Georgia. Founder Mangham Edward Griffin, who was born in 1899, worked with his father catering barbecues. Some customers preferred a mustard-based barbecue sauce, more popular east of Georgia, and others west of the state liked a ketchup-based taste, so Griffin created a sauce that mixed both condiments. The legend is that Griffin named the sauce after his wife because he was convinced a woman's name would help it sell better. Whether it was the name or the distinctive flavor that helped it, the sauce became popular enough that by 1949, Griffin had built a production facility in downtown Macon, Georgia. The company remains there to this day.

Every barbecue sauce across the United States seems to have its own flavor profile, and the taste of Mrs. Griffin's Barbecue Sauce continues to reflect its Southern roots. It's not like the typical sweet barbecue sauces so common in the midwest, such as Kansas City style, which relies on molasses and brown sugar. The mustard and vinegar makes for a more tangy and savory sauce that is typical of Southern states. The sauce is also on the thinner side, which makes it versatile enough to cook with and add flavor to foods like pork sandwiches, baked beans, veggies, and salads. It would also work well to marinate pork chops for maximum flavor.

Though the original recipe remains unchanged in both taste and how it's made (it's a four day process of mixing the ingredients in a vat to make a batch of the sauce), the company has grown to now offer four varieties of the sauce, including Mrs. Griffin's Regular, Sweet, Hot, and Hickory Smoked Barbecue Sauce, to suit all types of tastebuds, no matter where in the world you live.