Food & Beverage · August 2026
Susie and Todd Bulloch make barbecue sauce, and had been walking through what grocery distribution actually costs — including the free box of every flavour a national retailer expects for every one of its stores. The line lands in the middle of that arithmetic.
Transcript
No, our all-in costs are actually going to be going down because we're buying so much more sauce now. Yeah. Like our products, it's like there's always a scale that tips as you start to grow your business. And anybody who's in products knows that your manufacturer says we can give it for you, give it to you if you order this many bottles at this price. But if you order this many bottles, your price starts to go down. So that's our goal is to work on lowering our costs so that when we do go into grocery and we have to pay distributor fees and we have to pay
this
one national retailer that I'm talking to requires me to send a free box to every store of every flavor they bring on. So the cost to do business, most people, if you ever want to talk about the backside of grocery distribution, I've learned about that this year. On the barbecue business side, it's fascinating. Fascinating. And there's so much I've learned and so many hidden expenses and hidden costs. And most people don't make it without outside investors and or daddy's big, big money buckets. And we are self-funding and bootstrapping this thing. So it's been quite an adventure.
I guess now that I'm thinking about it, I'm surprised there aren't more squeeze bottles of barbecue sauce. I'm just quickly going down my, in my mind, Giant Eagle BBQ Aisle, and the Heinans BBQ Aisle. And I would say 98% of that stuff is either plastic or glass-bottled tip shit. And it's not squeezed, but like squeeze seems to be like the best.
Yeah, Blueshog was a big thing when they switched from their jar to the squeeze. I was, but like Cosmos is switching. Kinder's a switching.
I think you're going to see a lot more people in a squeeze bottle.