What makes a sauce hot.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: North Carolina's barbecue sauce manufacturing firms

How it performs on 'que is part of the answer; mostly it's a matter of marketing.

People call me all the time, telling me they have the best sauce recipe in the country," says Tony Golding, a Winston-Salem food processor best known for bottling Mrs. Campbell's chowchow. "They call me and say, 'I got this recipe, and I know I'm going to get wealthy off this.'"

Golding, whose Golding Farms bottles several traditional barbecue sauces of its own plus 20 sauces for others, does his best to break the news gently: "I try to tell them that they're going into the most-competitive category in the food business. Everybody's got a barbecue sauce."

But each caller, he adds, is sure his or her sauce is so distinctively different that it's a recipe for success.

Some sauces are more different than others. Take Peter Villano's marinade. In a state where the tradition of barbecuing pork with one kind of red sauce or another is on the same footing as a religious rite, Peter's Unfamous Marinade is coal black and was formulated for beefsteaks. "You can rub it on your tires and clean them -- it's that black," says Villano, a Long Island native who moved to Hillsborough in 1992.

And with most barbecue sauces priced at a dollar or so a quart, Peter's is pricey. A 5-ounce bottle goes for $4 to $6. "It's the most-expensive product on the shelf, ounce for ounce," he says.

Vive la difference: In December, a little more than a year after Villano and his wife, Donna, perfected the sauce in their kitchen, the marinade -- which gets its color from charcoal and soy sauce -- is in 240 stores, including 45 Byrd's supermarkets, 12 Harris Teeters, 30 Krogers and 60 Winn-Dixies. That's saying something in the specialty-foods category, in which 80% of new products fail. "We're over the hump with the product," Villano says. "It's for real." He and his wife have already invested most of their savings -- $30,000 -- in launching the sauce. Still, things are looking up. With sales of 2,400 bottles a month, their dollar-a-bottle margin is generating more than two grand a month -- all of which they're plowing back into the company.

Villano credits his success to drafting a business plan, something it took him nearly a year to realize he needed. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, Villano learned the hard way what Barry Phillips, a counselor at the Small Business and Technology Development Center in Chapel Hill, tells all his clients: "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail."

Sauces have become one of the fastest-growing segments in the $26 billion specialty-food business, says David Weiss, president of Packaged Facts, a New York market-research firm. "There's a whole trend to spice up food and make it more colorful and better tasting and more exotic," he says.

Over the years, North Carolina -- long the home of Texas Pete and Carolina Treet -- has produced a flood of reddish-hued variations on traditional barbecue-sauce recipes: Greensboro's Thomas Sauce, Richard Petty Barbecue Sauce from Jamestown, Bone Suckin' Sauce from Ford's Fancy Fruits in Raleigh, Scott's...