Saucy Business

Dan and Kathy Blakeney couldn’t find the perfect sauce, so they made their own.

Article by MICHAEL DEVAULT | Photography by BRAD ARENDER

Dan Blakeney has spent a lot of time around food over the past few years. After 28 years in the trucking industry, he and his wife, Kathy, decided to try something a little closer to home and opened a barbeque restaurant in Rayville. That’s when they started to notice something.

They couldn’t find a single barbeque sauce that did everything they wanted. So they decided to make their own.
“In doing our cookings, I’ve always experimented,” says Dan, owner of Blakeney’s Originals, a sauce brand manufactured in West Monroe. “We were making up barbeque sauces ourselves, and people would really like the sauce when I let them try it.”
Over time, the Blakeneys closed the Rayville barbeque shop, but they remained around food. For a time, Dan did catering out of Sports City Grill, and later served as catering director at Willie’s Duck Diner. He also helped a lot around West Monroe High School.

“We’ve always been very active there, cooking for the teams, the coaches and the teachers,” he says. All the while, people loved his food, but they loved the sauces he concocted even more. He knows an opportunity when he sees it. That’s why he founded Blakeney’s Originals.

The first sauce he started bottling is called Cajun Sweet Mustard Sauce. It combines a sweet base with the vinegary tartness of mustard in one, tangy creation.

“That’s what makes it so good,” he says. “You can use it on a variety of foods. It’s great on anything you grill. It’s also a good dipping sauce for veggies, and you can pour it over cream cheese to eat on crackers. Mix it with mayonnaise and you have the best dipping sauce for chicken nuggets.”

That was their first sauce, and it was the one they made the most frequently. Serving it up at church luncheons, barbeques or even just at home, Dan says it was one of their favorites. They made the first batches one gallon at a time, mostly for home use.
“The Cajun Sweet Mustard is a great alternative to barbeque sauce,” he says.

Before long, they were off into other experimental sauces. That’s how he perfected Blakeney’s Original Gourmet Salad Mix, a mayonnaise-based product that makes short order of some of the best Southern cuisine.

“In just five minutes, you can have chicken salad, tuna salad, ham salad,” he says. “You can even chop up shrimp for shrimp salad.”

With such a versatile sauce, it’s no wonder the Blakeney family became popular fixtures in the First West Church kitchen. All the while, people kept asking to buy the sauce. Eventually, he decided it was time to bottle it.

They found a spot to make and bottle the sauce at Montgomery Poultry in West Monroe. From a small kitchen there, they began producing the Cajun Sweet Mustard and Gourmet Salad Mix. Pretty quickly, Blakeney’s Originals were appearing on store shelves across north Louisiana, from Shreveport to Delhi.

“It’s the convenience of it, plus the quality of the taste of the salad mix,” he says. “That’s what makes people buy it.”
Part of the formula for the success of their upstart has been sampling the product at grocery stores and craft fairs. Anywhere people gather, they’ll do tastings. Just getting people to try it, is usually all it takes.

“When we go out to shows or to the stores, 90 percent of the people who try it will buy it,” he says. “Pretty much anybody who tries it loves it.”

Blakeney and his team – his wife works alongside him, with four part-time employees – manufacture and bottle the sauces locally. They also source all of their ingredients from local suppliers, using Louisiana products when available. Each bottle carries a “Certified Louisiana Product” label, and that’s something Dan is quite proud of.

“We buy as much as we can from people within the state,” he says, adding that locally sourced ingredients help lend authenticity to the product.

With the two sauces, he’s begun growing a faithful following. However, he doesn’t plan on stopping with Cajun Sweet Mustard and Gourmet Salad Mix. There are other products in the pipeline.

“We’re experimenting now,” he says. “We have samples out with some of the local churches and stores.”

When the ladies from one of the area churches approached him about taking some Blakeney’s Originals on her ladies’ retreat to Florida, he sent along a new tartar sauce that he’s readying for production. The tartar sauce was a hit.

“She used our tartar sauce to make chicken salad,” he says. “It has a little bit of a bite, and when she came back, she told us the ladies loved it.”

He estimates the new product will hit shelves sometime in the next six months. Right now, the final formula is at LSU’s Food Science division for certification and shelf-life testing.

“We also have a couple of other sauces, a barbeque sauce and a basting sauce, that we use a lot,” he says. “As these sauces get going and we have the resources to start adding to the line, we’ll put the new sauces out.”

He says they’re moving with caution, though, because the barbeque and basting space is quite competitive. Given what we’ve tasted of his other Originals, though, we can hardly wait for a Blakeney’s Originals BBQ on the shelf at the grocery store.
You can order Blakeney’s Originals sauces online at www.blakeneysauces.com. Or look for it in your grocery store on the condiments shelves at Brookshires, Super 1 Foods, or Mac’s Fresh Market.