The Growing Demand for Real Barbecue

BBQ Gourmet is dedicated to promoting real BBQ and supplying the United Kingdom with the best competition-winning BBQ rubs, sauces, marinades & accessories from the United States.

We also aim to provide our customers with links to some of the best sources of information on barbecue available on the web.

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As many of you will already know, public interest, and the market, for real barbecue is booming. Customer’s interest and willingness to put up with sausages, burgers and chicken legs burnt outdoors is waning rapidly. To get the most out of BBQ season, it’s important you think beyond the obvious and offer customers a taste of something different

Catering for such demand is BBQ Gourmet.  “There is so much more to barbecue than burning a sausage outdoors,” says BBQ Gourmet founder, Richard Orme.  American barbecue is a very different kettle of meat: “it’s all based on cooking ‘low and slow’, that is low temperature and cooking slowly.”

“For a full brisket, you could be looking at 8-12 hours to smoke it properly.  BBQ Gourmet’s mission is to spread the word about real barbecue.  It’s a rapidly-growing market in the UK.  In 2019, over 30 barbecue restaurants opened up around the UK, and the number of competition barbecue teams has grown massively in the last couple of years.  BBQ Gourmet identifies and imports the top championship-winning BBQ rubs, sauces and marinades along with the more specialist injections, brines and soaks from the United States and then supply these throughout the UK, both retail and wholesale.”

“What we need to educate the public about are barbecue rubs.  Of course, the vast majority of British people know about barbecue sauce, but many think that you can marinade and cook in it, then they wonder why their meat comes out black as the ace of spades because all the sugar is burnt.  What most people are unaware of is that the real source of barbecue flavour is not BBQ sauces, it’s rubs.  Rubs are spice & herb mixes which are applied to meat prior to cooking.  Rubs enhance the flavour whether the meat is cooked by direct heat, as with a grill, by slow cooking in a smoker, or in the oven.  They are usable year-round and work just as well in an electric oven in the middle of winter as they do on a barbecue outdoors. And rubs work on vegetables too. These days, a good barbecue will cater for the growing number of people on meat-free diets and with food intolerances, as well as chiming with currently-popular eating habits.”

“BBQ Gourmet offers ‘over 800 products’,” Richard says, “and our product range continues to grow based on requests from customers.  We pick and choose the very best rubs and sauces, all of which have been developed and proven in BBQ competitions in the States.  Unless the products have won big awards, we don’t bring them in.  Every year, there are hundreds of barbecue competitions around the United States, some with prize money over $50,000.  When a competition BBQ team starts winning competitions with a particular rub formula, that’s when they bottle it up, give it a distinctive label and silly name to differentiate it in the market, and we import it.”  

“BBQ Gourmet can help all independent retailers get a share of the booming market for real barbecue.”

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