Barbecue sauce remains family secret

Published 3:57 pm Tuesday, December 6, 2005

MOULTRIE — No matter how you spell it, nothing says all-American like barbecue sauce.

It’s an aphrodisiac for the appetite. It ascends to legendary heights folks never seem to tire discussing — especially over a plate of ribs.

What makes a condiment take on a life of its own — where folks drive hours to just to buy a bottle or lie to their children to hog it for themselves? A Colquitt County couple think they know the secret, but they’re not telling.

Only Leon and Cindy Fulmer and their youngest child, Eric, know the recipe.

“He’s like the Bush’s baked bean dog,” Cindy said, nodding over to Eric.

Now almost 19, Eric helps his parents conjure up Leon’s Bar-B-Que Sauce in a backyard utility building turned USDA-certified food manufacturing facility. The Fulmers are one of only two legal independent barbecue sauce manufacturers in the county.

Leon worked his hocus smokus for five years until creating this final version of his sauce.

“When he hit this particular combination, I said don’t touch it, don’t do another thing,” Cindy said.

The back of the label has clues: Brown sugar, lemon, onion, coriander, sage. But, although, some have tried, they can’t duplicate Leon’s recipe for the thick, sweet sauce that goes great with nearly anything, including fingers. You would never have guessed a New Jersey native came up with it.

“It’s unique, and it doesn’t taste like a (commercial) barbecue sauce you can pull off the shelf,” Cindy said, adding the sauce won first place in Moultrie in March as a first-time entry and has never placed under second place in numerous other competitions.

“We’ve got people hooked on this sauce, and they say they don’t even like the store-bought sauce anymore,” Leon said.

Any given weekend, you can find Leon and Cindy Fulmer selling their sauce at the Tallahassee Flea Market. They started off selling a case one weekend four years ago. Now, thanks mainly to word of mouth, they sell anywhere from $500 to $800 worth of the sauce in a weekend at Booth 171, Row C. They also distribute the sauce to stores and restaurants plus sell by mail-order.

Throngs of taste-testers soon become customers, and most become repeat, loyal customers, the Fulmers said.

“We had a girl come from Daytona Beach and bought one $5 bottle, got in her car and went back home. We couldn’t believe it,” Leon said. “We’ve got people who buy it and hide it from their kids.”

“We have one customer who tells his kids it’s motor oil, so they won’t get into it,” Cindy added.

It’s gotten so other vendors ask to have their booths next to the “Bar-B-Que People,” Cindy said.

Leon began giving his sauce away 14 years ago to friends and cooking with it at church. He used to cook competitively. But when his sauce took off, he decided to commit his time and attention to it. He was so serious, in fact, that he (gasp) sold his smoker.

Going into business for themselves has been a learning experience to say the least. The Fulmers started making their sauce in their kitchen, which is a “big no-no,” Cindy said. When they decided to sell it commercially, they borrowed $1,000 from the bank and approached the University of Georgia Extension Service for information on how to legally manufacturer and sell their product. They can’t say enough about the UGA program, they said.

Now they ship it all over the U.S., and the taste of Leon’s has hit palates in Australia, Germany, England, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, Honduras and Canada.

“Yeah, Canadians really like it. And another group you’d be surprised is Texans. … For people from Texas to come up and tell us they love our sauce, to us, it’s one of the highest compliments you can get,” Cindy said. “People in Texas are absolutely 150 percent serious about their barbecue. People in Georgia ain’t got nothing on them when it comes to being highly competitive about their barbecue.”

For the 4th of July, they sent a case to a local soldier in Tikrit to use in a barbecue for his unit.

The Fulmers won’t divulge their income but say that so far, it’s enough for Cindy to quit her job at Riverside Manufacturing to devote to mixing and marketing the sauce. Leon, who is managing cancer, hopes to make enough to leave his trucking job and become a full-time entrepreneur.

They produce 50 to 80 gallons a week and haven’t raised prices in four years despite rising transportation and production costs. Leon’s Bar-B-Que Sauce is sold by the Fulmers by the pint for $3, the quart for $5, the gallon for $18 and 2.5 gallons for $35. Or you can buy it in pints by the case for $33 or two-bottle gift packs for $13. There is a markup at stores that sell their product.

Locally, you can purchase Leon’s at Oxley’s, Allegood’s, Dunn Brothers, Bill’s Produce and Sonny’s, among others.

Leon turned down a national marketer, because they don’t want to compromise their product. The sauces is hand-measured and mixed in small batches.

“If it means that we don’t ever get any bigger than we are, then we’ve not given up and sacrificed who we were,” Cindy said.

Later this year, Leon’s Bar-B-Que will bear a nutritional label, which the Fulmers are bracing for.

“It definitely ain’t low-carb,” Cindy said.



On the Internet: www.leonsbbqsauce.com