LIVERPOOL — As a kid growing up in the 1960s just north of Bayberry, Mike Otis relentlessly hounded his dad to share the recipe for his barbecue sauce. The patriarch, Ed Otis, would cook up delicious sauce every summer, basing it on a recipe handed down from his mom in the 1920s.
“I loved family dinners in the summertime when barbecued chicken was on the table,” Mike recalled in a recent email.
In his early teens, he joined Boy Scout Troop 139 in Liverpool.
“When we’d go on camping outings,” Mike wrote. “I’d ask my dad for the recipe so I could make the sauce for my friends. He’d always look at me and tell me with this stern voice, ‘You’re not old enough to handle this recipe…when you’re 21 you can have it.’”
It became a running joke between father and son, but Ed stubbornly refused to share the recipe.
“On the day I turned 21, in my birthday card, handwritten on a 3×5 card, was the base recipe, for what is now Otis’s Battle Tested Craft Barbecue Sauce.” Mike wrote in his email. “I still have that card framed and on my desk.”
Long process
Mike’s foray into the dog-eat-dog world of selling barbecue sauce has been simmering for decades.
“I started making the sauce in my early 20s and through the years I added spices and other flavors, and then I would make a single batch and give it to friends who would encourage me to bring it to market,” he wrote. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve heard this for over 35 years from people.’ So, I came home and said to my wife, Deardria, ‘Honey, we’re going to bring the sauce to market.’ And she said, ‘Great. How?’ I responded, ‘I have no idea.’”
But as he began researching the sauce biz, he received zero encouragement from friends and acquaintances.
Ignored naysayers
“Everyone, and I mean everyone told me not to do it, that it was too competitive an industry and I would likely fail,” he wrote. “My response was always the same. ‘I know that the odds are against me, but I need to know, what do I do next?’”
Mike developed the sauce and its marketing strategy in downtime from his full-time job, operating Media One, an advertising company.
“My wife and I did everything from naming the product, filing trademarks, to figuring out how to make it in large batches – hundreds of gallons at a time – to label designs, nutrition panels, bar codes, marketing, you name it. And we did it all in just over a year.”
Marketing strategy
Battle Tested made its debut in April 2019 at the Flavors of Carolina Show in Charlotte and got picked up by a big chain restaurant group in that market. Currently there in North Carolina where he and Deardria live in Raleigh, they’ve placed their product at Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Food Lion, Lowes Foods and many smaller groceries.
“We’ve got it on the shelves at more than 800 stores across the state and in Atlanta in just less than two years,” Mike wrote. “And our goal is to be a national brand within three more years.”
Otis’ Battle Tested sauces retail for $8.95 per 19-oz. bottle online, but you can get one for a bargain $6.99 at Nichols in Liverpool. In fact, last week Nichols had the Otis product listed on special at $5.99!
The sauces can also be purchased at Mazzye’s Meats on Route 57 and at Spera’s Meat Markets in Cicero and Manlius.
Last week, Mike sent me four bottles of his sauces which are accurately labeled “smokey sweet.” The Battle Tested brand uses two different kinds of wood for its smokiness, mesquite and hickory. Each of those flavors come in an “original” state and as a “signature” brand. The originals are each a tad sweeter and smokier than the two signature brands which promise a subtle splash of heat.
Behind the ‘Battle’ name
“My sixth-generation grandfather served in the American Revolution,” Mike explains. “His first cousin was James Otis, who gave the speech declaring ‘Taxation without representation equals tyranny.’
“Then my dad served in combat during WWII in Germany and France. Me, I served 22 years in the U.S. Air Force and participated in Operation Desert Storm, and today my son, Nick, serves with the Air Force’s 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field.”
No wonder, then, Mike and Deardria donate 5% of profits to charities which work with vets suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Not a happy topic,” Mike observes, “but an important one none the less. More than 20 veterans die every day from suicide – that’s one every 72 minutes.”
Ed Otis would surely have been proud of what Mike has done with that cherished recipe the old man had held onto so tightly. Ed passed away March 23, 2000, at age 74.
For more about Otis’ Battle Tested sauces, visit battletestedbbq.com/index.php, or check out a video at youtube.com/watch?v=SSpBEaCefXQ.
Last word
“It’s disruptively delicious.”
–Mike Otis regarding his Battle Tested Craft Barbecue Sauce.
