Kinder's: 8 Facts About The Popular BBQ Sauce Brand

You've surely seen Kinder's BBQ sauce down the condiment aisle on your grocery shopping excursions. The brand has become a major player in the world of cookout flavoring, providing pit masters and home grillers alike premium selections at sensible prices. The range of possibilities offered by the Kinder's line invites experimentation with open-fire cuisine, perfectly designed to turn a novice with a flipper and a cooker into a full-fledged rib-and-burger gourmet with no culinary school required. But this grilling solution didn't start out as a sassy sauce; the roots of the brand are planted in the original Kinder's butcher shop and deli that became a restaurant, which grew into an undeniable force in the heated world of BBQ. 

While adding Kinder's piquant products to enhance your favorite BBQ and grilling recipes may be a no-brainer, the untold truth of BBQ's second-largest sauce and seasoning brand reveals family-style heart and soul that few other food producers have. It turns out this top-shelf company comes from humble beginnings, a spirit Kinder's has worked to retain while climbing to the heights of popularity across the U.S. Anyone wondering about the Kinder's brand is bound to be intrigued by a selection of savory facts about this beloved brand and the folks with the sauce to keep the company humming along as it grows.

Kinder's may not have always been synonymous with great sauce and seasonings, but it has always been a well-known provider of premium BBQ-adjacent meats. It was 1946 when WWII veteran John Kinder launched his first Northern California business, a butcher shop serving premium meats to customers. John trained under a professional butcher for a year before launching a kiosk of his own and eventually opening the first Kinder's deli in Richmond. This move kicked off what would become a staple restaurant chain in the region, lasting over 70 years and counting.

Quality and customer service were key elements in the original shop, an uncompromising combination modeled by the soft-spoken John. It was this dedication to providing a great product and showing appreciation for his patrons that created a legacy the elder Kinder would pass onto his family, an ethos that would eventually help grow what began as a simple meat market into a powerhouse global brand. The lunch counter was the perfect place for showcasing high-quality deli meats, with peckish customers in the mood for prime cuts becoming a regular presence. It also afforded the family the chance to cater events and circulate quality creations from its premier BBQ restaurant in the U.S. while developing a reputation for delivering delicious food in a friendly environment.

After John was robbed at gunpoint in 1985, he relocated the family and Kinder's deli and meat market to Concord, California, to give both his kids and his business a fresh start. As the operation grew, Kinder children entered the business. Eldest son Dan joined the effort, a natural choice to partner up as the meat shop gained traction and became a more intensive operation. Dan bought the company from his father in 1982 and continued the upward climb, recognizing the importance of community involvement for strengthening the brand.

Dan's then-wife, Paula, had been a fixture in the family and came on board to help guide the company into its next iteration, a provider of top-tier sauces and seasonings that would usher in a crucial new era for the Kinder's brand. Her thoughtful approach to helping the company succeed resulted in progress that launched the sauce and seasoning selections. Though the company became more complex as it expanded from a simple shop to a world-class brand, the core values of an industrious multi-generational family providing quality products to help home cooks elevate their craft remains an unwavering north star.

Kinder and Son may have kept the operation functioning at full steam, but it was Dan's wife Paula who had the inspiration for a signature BBQ sauce in 1988, an idea that would take the company to a whole new level of recognition and popularity. Though she wasn't a cook by trade, Paula was a talented butcher who understood the meat she served and how to make it more flavorful. She knew the lunch counter would benefit from a sauce that only Kinder's could provide. It would serve as a hallmark layer of the dine-in experience, something to give the restaurant unmistakable branding that could be used to expand the idea of what Kinder's could ultimately become.

Paula's attempt at cooking up a signature sauce wasn't a one-and-done situation. Aiming for a sweet sauce with a kick, she tinkered with the formula for a full year before settling on what would become Kinder's Original, a restaurant-level sauce that had the personality of a premium homemade barbecue sauce recipe. The finished product was an instant success that signaled a new yet related direction for the Kinder family to take their growing enterprise. Suddenly there were lines of hungry customers trailing out the door of the deli! This simple sauce led to such a shift for the company, Paula ended up launching P. K. Kinder Co., an organization dedicated to sauces, seasonings and marinades.

The well-worn adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is taken to heart at the Kinder's test kitchen. Rather than starting out with entirely new recipes for additional sauce flavors, the company begins with the formula for Original Sauce and tosses in exciting new elements to create layered brush-on goodness. So even if you can't taste it, the primary essence of all Kinder's sauces remains Paula's magic formula.

How many different ways can a sauce be tweaked? The current array includes six BBQ sauces, including the fiery-sweet Hot Honey and tangy-smoky Gold versions. In addition to these extensions of the original sauce, there are also stand-alone bottles: A chicken dipping sauce meant to make poultry sing with flavor; a trio of dedicated wing sauces that are great for glazing and dipping your favorite chicken bits; and a teriyaki glaze that lets you give your proteins and veggies a splash of sweet Asian essence. When you expand your vision to mixing Kinder's sauces with rubs and seasonings, the possibilities for conjuring incredible flavor become exponential. And to think, it all began with one ancestral sauce over three decades earlier.

Though running Kinder's was once fully a family endeavor, the passing of patriarch John Kinder and retirement of son Dan Kinder left only one Kinder behind the counter: Justin Kinder, Dan's son and John's grandson, who donned the apron as a third-generation Kinder honcho. Justin's role as President of Kindustries LLC keeps the family in "family-run" business as he conducts store operations, including opening the second flagship Kinder's location in Pleasant Hill in 1996 at age 20. It was trial by fire, but it provided the Bay Area even more exposure to the popular meat, deli, and BBQ and gave the brand greater presence for future growth. Through the years, Justin studied up on his leadership skills and became a devoted steward who honors the human-to-human exchange inherent in the restaurant industry.

Though patriarch John was still making appearances at the restaurant at age 90, looking after the cottage empire he created and reassuring customers of the quality and service the family had established, the elder Kinder sadly passed away on May 13, 2012. His obituary is a moving testament to his enduring legacy of family and accomplishment that began a blue-collar company that found mainstream success without losing its standards. Justin's younger brother Jacob opened the family's Brentwood store but was killed tragically in 2006 in a motorcycle accident, leaving Justin as the sole full-time Kinder in the operation.

You may be most familiar with the Kinder's BBQ sauce bottles you come face-to-face with while cruising through the big grocery chains, but the brand offers much more than just a squeeze of flavor to spruce up your grilled goodies. The current collection includes a whopping 226 products covering everything from gravy and dip mixes to panko bread crumbs and stuffing mix. Only 16 of those are sauce-based, leaving the remaining 210 to a smorgasbord of shake-ons, rubs, and powdered mixes. If there's a savory offering that can be jazzed up with inventive flavor, odds are Kinder's either has a product in the portfolio or is busy dreaming up something to fill the space.

What does the collection offer beyond squeezable slathers and brushable bastes? There are shake-on seasonings like Cowboy Butter, with Dijon mustard, garlic, and chili notes spicing up the simple buttery goodness, providing a zestier alternative to real butter that adds zing to meat and vegetables. Prime Steak, a savory sprinkle from the company's premium catalog, offers black garlic and truffle for a more gourmet take on the usual steak seasoning. And creative concoctions like Margarita Rub are on hand to infuse your grilled masterpieces with the smoky tingle of tequila and lime. The expansive imaginations at work behind the logo keep dreaming up fascinating new ways to bring a tongue-pleasing punch to whatever domestic chefs have cooking

There may already be an extensive line of products in the Kinder's portfolio, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for even more tasty inventions. Innovation is key in the operation, to keep things interesting for consumers as well as to ensure regular expansion of the brand. The company keeps its eye on emerging food movements, adding trendy items like bone broth gravy to the line. There are several formulas you may not find in other off-the-shelf seasonings, with sweet, fruity elements like peach and black cherry allowing novice cooks to achieve complex flavors without requiring a culinary education.

Anyone looking to cook the best barbecue on the block can investigate the whole Kinder's portfolio while keeping an eye out for intriguing new inventions hitting the market regularly. In 2025 alone, Kinder's has designs on introducing 16 new sauce flavors into the current selection. New bottles of BBQ, dipping and wing sauces, and marinades are coming to market throughout the year to make cookout season even more tempting.

Fun fact: Though you might think a brand so dedicated to BBQ cookery would have a sauce as its best-selling item, that honor belongs to an organic rub called The Blend, a salt-pepper-garlic rub attributed to John Kinder and affectionately known as Grandpa's Original Seasoning.

Anyone shopping for a premium BBQ sauce at sensible prices is bound for an encounter with Kinder's. This top-shelf squeeze is more than just a cost-effective way to flavor up your burgers and ribs; it's also the culmination of a humble family's hard work and dedication to making delicious flavorings available to cooks of all budgets. Having affordable toppers and mix-ins designed to deliver elevated enjoyment and dispel the long-held myth about BBQ that the person wearing the apron should be a trained chef. No matter your experience with flavoring food at your backyard, kitchen cooktop or anywhere else, the Kinder's collection aims to equalize the playing field.

The lack of pretension in Kinder's products as well as in the people who make the machine run provides a refreshing change of pace from other boastful brands who don't always live up to the hype. At its busiest point, there were 14 Kinder's restaurants and four stadium locations in operation, though that number has been drawn down to eight locations as of today. But the reputation for quality remains in all of the family's endeavors. Whether the company is conjuring up new blends of its famous flavorings to entice home cooks with delicious add-ins or focusing on new ways to introduce the Kinder's name into the culinary landscape, this modest-yet-mighty operation prides itself on its innovation to keep things fresh and tasty for generations to come.