Our back story
I made barbecue sauce one day just for fun, because I was tired of all the store-bought brands. I said, ‘Why not try to make some myself?’
I started making barbecue sauce for cooking and special events. Over the years, there were many different variations, but I always migrated back to my signature sauce.
My wife Renee and I began making the sauce in our kitchen in our little house in Sicklerville. It was always fun to do together. We started giving it away as Christmas gifts. People looked forward to it every year. They couldn’t wait to see that jar or bottle, whatever I got that year. It was definitely something special to see the excitement on people’s faces when we handed it out at Christmas. Renee would always say, “You should start a business selling your barbecue sauce”, and I always told her that one day, Shawn’s Wicked Awesome Barbecue sauce would be everywhere. She was my biggest supporter and my biggest critic. There were some flavors she loved, and some flavors she didn’t.
She designed the label that I used today, except for the addition of the green heart.
In 2021, Renee was diagnosed with cancer. That year, I wasn’t going to make sauce because things were just crazy, and she said, “You have to make a batch. People are expecting it. You have to keep the tradition.” Even though we didn’t get to make it together that year, she still pushed me to do it. So, with all the craziness going on, I scraped up everything I needed to make a batch of sauce. Unfortunately, in 2022, I lost Renee. She was my biggest supporter and my best friend. When Christmas came, and I heard her voice say, “You’ve got to get moving. You need to make a batch of sauce. Christmas is coming.” I did just that. I made that batch of sauce in the kitchen of our new house, but I had to do it by myself.
It was that day, and I decided that I needed to make the sauce for everyone to have, not just people for Christmas. So the painstaking process of figuring out how to get my sauce to everyone to enjoy started in the spring of 2023.
All said and done. It took until the summer of 2024 to finally get my first batch of sauce. It was a great feeling to have that first jar come off the processing line. It had Renee’s label on it with the addition of the green heart.
The green heart is a symbol of her. It was her thing to sign every text message with green hearts. So I decided to put the green heart on the label for everyone to have a little piece of her with every jar.
The goal of my business is simple: make a living doing something I genuinely love, and eventually give back however I can — whether that’s helping people, supporting animals, or doing my part to protect nature. I also want to be able to send green hearts all over this country so there could be a little piece of Renee in everyone’s life.