Sweet Baby Ray’s inventor inducted into Barbecue Hall of Fame

Another Illinois barbecue legend has been inducted into The American Royal Association’s Barbecue Hall of Fame.

While Dave Raymond might not be immediately recognizable to most people, you’ll likely know his nickname: Sweet Baby Ray. The sauce company he helped found in 1986 is one of the most popular barbecue sauce in the country, with an estimated 84 million Americans slathering it on dishes in 2020, ranking behind only A.1. Sauce.

The association applauded Raymond for crafting a great product with a catchy name, noting that what he might have lacked in classic chef training, he “made up for in sweat, hard work, (and) trial and error.”

Raymond said he picked up the nickname while playing basketball on Chicago’s West Side. “My brother was bigger than me and everyone called him Ray, so I was Baby Ray,” Raymond said. “I had a good jump shot, and someone said, ‘Hey, that’s sweet, Baby Ray.’”

Raymond started out in the pharmacy business but was lured into the barbecue game after a salesman came in boasting about his barbecue. “He told me, ‘I make good ribs,’ so I told him that I make great ribs,” Raymond said.

Eventually, the salesman came back and suggested they both compete in Mike Royko’s Ribfest, the popular barbecue event hosted in the 1980s by the popular Chicago columnist.

“I talked to my brother, a chef, to help craft a barbecue sauce,” Raymond said. It took four tries, but in 1985, Raymond’s team came in second place.

Excited by the response, he created the Sweet Baby Ray’s company with his brother and Mike O’Brien. But Raymond didn’t just bottle the sauce and hope for the best. Instead, he aggressively marketed it by pounding the pavement.

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“I started on North Avenue and went from Austin into the city, hitting both sides of the streets,” Raymond said. “After that, I went to other streets, and then went to the suburbs.”

It wasn’t easy. “My opinion is that it takes 200 times to be told no until you know how to be told yes,” he said. “No one was worse than me at first. I like to think I got better as time passed.”

Raymond also spent a lot of time giving out samples, as was documented in a Tribune article from Sept. 2, 1990: “Cooking 20 to 30 pounds of meat at a six-hour stretch and using up to two gallons of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, he can be found at grocery stores and parking lots throughout Du Page County, enticing consumers to try the sauce ‘that’s boss,’ as the label proudly states.”

His work paid off, as Sweet Baby Ray’s became one of the country’s most popular bottled barbecue sauces. He eventually sold it to Ken’s Foods but still helps run two catering companies and the Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue restaurant in suburban Wood Dale with his nephew Larry “Duce” Raymond. “I try to stay away because now is his time,” Raymond said. “One of my biggest blessings is to have my nephew as my business partner.”

Raymond hopes to see Chicago mentioned more for its barbecue. He’s a huge fan of Smoque BBQ, Honky Tonk Barbeque and especially Honey 1 BBQ. “I want people to know what a high-level Chicago barbecue is at,” Raymond said. “We have the old-time barbecue places and the new chef-driven places. We have the backyard grillers, who barbecue all winter long.”

Raymond joins a few other Illinois-based barbecue legends in the hall of fame, including James Lemons of Lem’s Bar-B-Q, Mike Mills of 17th Street Barbecue and Meathead Goldwyn, the cookbook author and creator of AmazingRibs.com.

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com