Article published in Cecil Whig, 2004

Elkton-area woman creates recipe for success
* Lou Ann Burns markets her own brand of barbecue sauce
By:Carl Hamilton , cahamilton@cecilwhig.com  09/03/2004

The perfect barbecue sauce has a balanced blend of robust flavor and tongue-tingling zip, according to Lou Ann Burns.

But Burns couldn't find that elusive sauce on supermarket shelves in Texas, of all places, during the 1960s.

So she concocted her own.

"I always had to doctor up whatever I bought from the store,'' Burns said. "I love to barbecue -- chicken, ribs, even seafood, you name it. I take my barbecue pretty seriously."
"One day,'' she continued, "I just started throwing together things out of my kitchen and I came up with this barbecue sauce, the sauce I could never find in stores."

Burns' homemade sauce satisfied her persnickety palate for more than 35 years, as well as those of her friends and family.

Now it's titillating the taste buds of hundreds of paying customers in the tri-state area. Under the registered trademark of Antie Lou's Bar-B-Que, her sauce is sold in seven stores in this region.

Having recently retired from the nursing profession, Burns plans to focus more time and effort on spreading her barbecue sauce business over an even wider area.

"It's unreal how this all started,'' said Burns, 66, while sitting in the kitchen of her Elkton area home Tuesday. "I still can't believe people are buying my barbecue sauce."

According to Tim Herman, co-owner of Herman's Quality Meat Shoppe in Newark, Del., Antie Lou's Bar-B-Que pushed other brands off the shelves about four years ago, back when Burns merely dabbled as an entrepreneur.

"We use it exclusively at our shop because it sells so well,'' Herman said. "We used to carry three or four other sauces, but they stopped selling when we introduced her (Burns') barbecue sauce."

Herman's shop caters to gourmet chefs and other discerning patrons, Herman noted.

"The fact that (Burns') barbecue sauce sells so well here is really a tribute to her," Herman said. "We're a specialty shop, so our customers have pretty high standards. A lot of cooks come in here and buy her sauce. We've only heard good things, good feedback."

So Antie Lou's Bar-B-Que is cooking in the sales department at Herman's. But does Herman slather the stuff on his own chicken and pork?

"That's all we use at home,'' Herman said. "Her sauce is the perfect blend. It has a little bit of a bite to it, but it's not too hot. It has plenty of flavor, but it's not too sweet. Somehow, she came up with a recipe that pleases everyone's taste buds."

Closer to home, Antie Lou's Bar-B-Que sales also are sizzling at State Line Liquors in Elkton, according to co-owner Robert Murray.

"Her barbecue sauce does very well,'' Murray said. "We have a whole line of salsas and barbecue sauces, hundreds of them, and her barbecue sauce is one that really sells."

Murray also endorses Antie Lou's Bar-B-Que as a consumer, commenting, "It's pretty good stuff. It has plenty of flavor and a little bit of a kick to it."

The brand name, Antie Lou's Bar-B-Que, is an affectionate gesture to Burns' niece, Michele Medley, who is now 51 and lives in Alaska.

"When she was a girl, she used to always say, 'Antie Lou, you're going to have your sauce on store shelves someday," Burns recalls.

Burns shared her sauce with friends and family over the years while living in Houston, Texas, and several of them urged her to market it.

But Burns was raising her two daughters as a single parent. She also was busy as a cold pantry chef at the Houston Yacht Club, which used her homemade barbecue sauce for its regatta feasts. Then she started nursing school, making her even busier.

In the late 1980s, however, with grown children and a little more time on her hands, Burns decided to make her sauce market-worthy.

First, because Burns is a pinch-here-and-a-dash-there kind of cook, she tweaked her almost improvisational recipe.

"I figured it would have to taste the same every time if I put it on the market. Every time I made a batch, I wrote down what I did,'' Burns said. "When I didn't like it, I'd fine-tune it some more."

Burns made at least 10 different batches of sauce before she hit upon a balanced blend of flavor and spice. So she finally had the perfect recipe.

But still, Burns didn't market her ideal cornucopia of ingredients until 1995. It happened shortly after she moved to Cecil County to be near her daughter, Andrea, 41, her husband, Kent, and their children.

Andrea encouraged her greatly. "She even drew the logo,'' Burns said, referring to the "Antie Lou's" banner draped across a horseshoe.

It appears on Burns' business cards and on her sauce labels, which boast, "Texas Best," and instruct "for poultry, pork & seafood . . . in or outside."

Burns and her daughter also had to work their way down piles of paperwork -- applications for a registered trademark, health department approval, a bar code . . .

"I even had to send my barbecue sauce to Lancaster (Pa.) Labs, so they could do a chemical analysis on it and determine its shelf life," Burns noted.

And they had to make countless phone calls and conduct extensive research to competitively price the sauce and to find a suitable bulk supplier of containers.

They also had to find acceptable bulk suppliers of tomato concentrate, onions, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, hickory flavoring and other sauce ingredients.

* * * *

When her sauce finally became a legitimate product, Burns made huge batches in the kitchen of the North East Volunteer Fire Hall.

"You need the room and the proper equipment, big kettles and stuff like that,'' Burns said, explaining why she didn't cook in her own kitchen.

It took about five hours for two people to produce 20 cases of sauce, she said. Each case contains 12 pint-sized jars, she added.

Then Burns hawked her sauce at stores, farmers markets and other places, including Perry Point Veterans' Hospital where she worked as a nurse.

She typically let the product speak for itself, giving free samples everywhere she went.

These days, with steady sales at seven stores and plans to expand her business, Burns pays a commercial kitchen in Pennsylvania to make her sauce.

Using six 100-gallon kettles for cooking, the commercial kitchen (Stoltzfas) produced 60 cases of Antie Lou's Bar-B-Que last fall and 100 more cases in May.

Commercial kitchen or no, Burns still strives for that homemade taste. No batch of her sauce goes out the door until Burns gives the OK.

"I go up there to make sure it tastes right, that it's consistent,'' Burns said. "I quality assure it. They don't jar any of it until I taste-test it."

She also safeguarded herself against copycats. "The (commercial kitchen) company signed a confidentiality agreement. It protects my recipe,'' Burns said.

She stores the remaining cases in her basement, her distribution center if you will. When her inventory gets low, she contacts the commercial kitchen.

Burns estimates that she has sold 500 cases in 10 years. One of her biggest accounts, Halda's in Wilmington, Del., sells about six cases a month. Herman's sells about five cases monthly.

But business aside, what does Burns think of her sauce?

"The marvelous thing about it is it's so versatile,'' Burns said. "One lady I know uses it as a base for her turkey soup. Another one uses it in her spaghetti sauce."

Back when Burns lived in Texas, some neighborhood children found a pretty straightforward use for her sauce.

"They told me, 'Mrs. Burns, we just made barbecue sandwiches with your sauce. We put it on just bread and it was good," Burns said.