Sauce bosses Craft condiment creators not standing pat as they ride wave of success By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, Jun. 15, 2024

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This article was published 15/06/2024 (695 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Connor Ward freely admits that he has been known to toot his own horn from time to time, albeit surreptitiously.

Whenever the co-founder of Westside Premium Craft Sauce is picking up a few items at one of the close to six dozen retailers in the province that stock his and his partners’ barbecue and marinade sauces, he’ll almost always pause in the condiment aisle to loudly announce “look, they have Westside sauce!”

Or if somebody is rolling a shopping cart past his, he might reach for a bottle and remark “have you tried this? It’s made right here in Winnipeg and I hear it’s fantastic.”

Ward, 36, can’t say for certain if anybody has ever returned home with their sauce because of “some crazy-sounding guy at the grocery store,” but hey, every little bit helps, he chuckles.

“These last four years with Westside has been the absolute wildest thing I’ve ever experienced,” he continues, running a hand through a mane of shoulder-length blonde hair. “We went from basically nothing to today, where we have three sales people on the road, criss-crossing the country promoting our stuff. Every couple of months we ask ourselves ‘is that it, is the bubble finally going to burst?’ Then the phone rings and it’s time to get back to work.”

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Ward, a University of Winnipeg Collegiate alumnus and former competitive snowboarder and wakeboarder, describes Westside Premium Craft Sauce as a pandemic success story.

His family has been involved in the hospitality industry his entire life, having owned and operated hotels in Red Lake, Pine Falls, Emerson and Winnipeg. He followed in his forebears’ footsteps in 2015, when he and his cousin Kal Smith, a fellow “hotel brat,” purchased what he calls a depressed property in Altona, one they were eventually able to bring back to life.

Buoyed by their success in the southern Manitoba community, Ward and Smith scooped up a second inn in 2019, a Howard Johnson’s at 3740 Portage Ave. Like most hotels, it came with an on-site restaurant, the Hat Tricks Sports Bar and Grill. A priority of theirs was to revamp the menu, to make it appeal to guests and non-guests alike.

“One of the ideas we had was for a weekly wing night, only we wanted to separate ourselves from the rest of the pack by producing all our own sauces, in-house,” Ward continues, seated inside the Marion Hotel, which Smith’s family has owned and operated since 1984, and where he worked as a bellhop beginning at age 12. “And because the plan was to make them fresh in small batches, we were like, let’s do them all-natural with zero preservatives.”

The sauces, which were largely orchestrated by Ergin Gooriah, the food and beverage director for both of their hotels, were a hit, not just with wings. A sweet chili sauce they developed worked great with ribs. A peanut Thai number paired perfectly with turkey wraps. Then along came COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, which ground all the progress they had been making to a halt, for the most part.

“We definitely got crushed the first few months of COVID, but we used that period wisely, by catching up on things such as room renos and tech upgrades that we never had time for, previously,” says Ward, who currently sits on the board of the Manitoba Hotel Association. “As it continued to drag on, however, we knew we’d have to do something in order not to lay off a bunch of staff, so we started a ghost kitchen called Westside Delivery, using all the same sauces from when the restaurant was fully open.”

Always one to do his homework, Ward became intrigued in early 2021 when he read how the global craft-sauce market was in the neighbourhood of $2.5 billion. Since the reviews for their mixtures were almost universally positive, what if they tried to nab a piece of that billion-dollar pie, he wondered, by bottling their output to determine if it would appeal to an even wider audience?

In March 2021 Ward, Smith and Gooriah, whom they brought on board as a partner in the venture, went shopping for clear glass bottles with resealable caps. After filling the vessels and affixing the proper labels, they announced on Instagram that their “mouth-watering, homemade sauces are now available to purchase,” along with the addendum, “limited stock currently available.” The codicil was no word of a lie. Not sure what demand would be like, they bought a mere 24 237-ml. bottles, for starters.

Those two dozen sold out fairly rapidly, as did the next run of 64 bottles. By April 2021 they had gotten a foot in the door with the Food Fare outlet on Cavalier Drive, but things really took off for Westside later that summer, when the sauces were picked up by Sobeys/Safeway, for the chain’s buy-local promotion.

Rick Champagne is the owner of the Sobeys store at 50 Sage Creek Blvd. If he recalls correctly, Ward approached him just under three years ago to ask if he would be interested in carrying Westside sauces. At their meeting, he was presented with samples to taste. He was sold immediately, he says when reached at work.

“Any time we can support local is an added benefit. Couple that with a great product and it is definitely a win-win,” Champagne says.

Champagne has tried all seven of Westside’s staple flavours, you know, in the name of research, as well as seasonal varieties such as pineapple-habañero and North Carolina barbecue.

He claims to enjoy each one but if he had to pick a favourite, he would go with their Korean BBQ sauce, done with short ribs. (Over at Luxe Barbeque Company, which stocks Westside sauces at all three of its stores including one in Saskatchewan, company president Phil Squarie says he uses Westside’s peanut Thai sauce in rice bowls, adding “if you toss chicken wings in their hot honey, you will be in love.”)

Westside sauces are currently produced in a commercial kitchen in Warren, by Howard Johnson’s staff who are interested in picking up extra hours. Ward says there is an added bonus to their new surroundings. A neighbouring saskatoon-berry farm has inspired the cooks to experiment with a whisky-berry barbecue sauce, which should be available for purchase by mid-July.

As well, they recently put the finishing touches on U.S.-compliant labelling that will allow them to begin shipping south of the border, sometime in the near future. For now, though, the plan is to continue stocking stores as far west as Calgary and Edmonton, and as far east as, well, wait and see, Ward says with a wink.

“One of my jobs is handling online orders that pour in from all over the country,” he explains. “Last month I received an email from a person living in New Brunswick, whose friend had brought back bottles of our sauce from a culinary trade show he attended in Toronto.”

The fellow wrote that he thought their product was great, and that he was interested in distributing it in his home province. Except he had one question. He said they might go over better if, given his postal code, the name was switched to Eastside.

Ward’s response: buy enough sauce and he could call it whatever he liked. Southside, Northside… be their guest.

For more information go to westsidesauce.com.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca