Powdered ketchup, mustard, and ranch? Two Philly dads hope to disrupt the condiment category.

It’s a safe bet when swinging open the average refrigerator that you’ll find a small army of half-used condiments: ketchup and mustard, barbecue and hot sauces, mayo, salad dressings, and more. Their ages and expirations dates vary, and as time goes on, they’re as likely to be thrown out as they are to be used up.

Two suburban Philly dads want to shake up that scenario — literally.

Delco native Paul Lehmann and Midwest transplant Carl Starkey, coworkers at West Chester’s Westtown School athletics department, got deeply into grilling over the pandemic. They hit the barbecue sauce hard, and the empty squeeze bottles in their recycling multiplied as a result. So the pair started meditating on an idea: “Can you take the water out of sauce?”

In January 2021, they started tinkering in Lehmann’s garage. By June, they were incorporating their new business, AWSM Sauce, which reproduces beloved condiments in space-saving — and arguably earth-saving — powdered form.

Pour a packet of AWSM Sauce into a jar of water and shake, and you’ll make 5 ounces of fresh ketchup, honey hickory barbecue, or Chesapeake fire sauce. Starkey and Lehmann, now working full time on this project, have raised $760,000 in funding and are developing more recipes for their lineup. They’re working with a manufacturer in Warminster and have sent out more than 30,000 sample kits since their official launch last May.

The Inquirer talked with the two entrepreneurs about AWSM Sauce’s future flavors, the condiment category’s environmental impact, their recent stint at the Minnesota Twins stadium, and their hopes to break into the Philly sports-concession world.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Carl Starkey: There’s three steps: We source the dry ingredients, blend and package it, and then sell it.

Paul Lehmann: Everything starts from a powdered ingredient: tomato powder, garlic powder, onion powder. What you realize when you dive into the flavor ecosystem is that any ingredient can be powderized. I wasn’t aware of vinegar powders two years ago, but we obviously work with them. We have a food scientist on our team, and we provide an a formula to our co-packer. They put the formula into a manufacturable, scalable formulation from there, and then off we go.

CS: We try to make as much as a clean label as possible. It’s challenging. Our ketchup and fire sauces are gluten-free but the barbecue has a barley base. And the ketchup is vegan, but the barbecue has honey powder. So there’s things on the label that will change we continue to develop, and as customers say, “Oh, I want zero sugar or organic.” Our first goal coming out of the gate was: Can we have a product that yields exactly what they’re expecting in a sustainable format?

PL: We do have a patent pending, based on the idea of always having a vessel with a consistent fill line — always a third of a cup of water — and then having various amounts of powder that yield the correct consistency and flavor for the sauce.

PL: Oh man, we wish that we could —

CS: The answer is yes.

PL: Carl says yes and I always say no. We’re working on that. The first step is ranch. We are excited to add the creamy sauces and dressings into our product line. The emulsion — where you need the fats in the oil to create that consistency — it’s a much harder piece.

CS: Well, mustard is a bear.

PL: Mustard does have some oil just naturally from the mustard seed. A classic yellow mustard is our next to come to market, we hope. It’s got some clumping issues when we shake, so we’re working through that.

PL: Two months, but if you keep it in the fridge, it can last longer. We say you take the storage out of your fridge and put it in your cabinet. And the cool thing about this is when our when our product line expands, and you got the ranches and the soys and the Japanese barbecue — now when you need that sauce bottle for that specific dish, you can pull it from the cabinet, make it fresh when you want it, and not have that extra half-a-bottle sitting in the fridge.

CS: In 2020, Heinz produced 1 billion single-use squeeze bottles, so that’s 100 million pounds of plastic and it’s 120 million gallons of water being shipped.

PL: For us, it’s about the single-use plastic, but it’s also about the recognizing that sauces are somewhere between 60% and 70% water, depending on the sauce. Our goal is to be a zero-waste condiment. We’ve removed 90 to 95% of the plastic compared to a single-use plastic bottle, and we removed the 100% of the water weight. We’re about a third of the weight [of traditional ketchup].

CS: One of the things that I think is important to note is that we’re able to provide sustainable improvements across the entire spectrum: in a home kitchen, a restaurant, and at a stadium. At the stadium level, the value that we’re bringing is that shipped weight/storage side of it. In the home, we’re hitting the plastic because you’re not going to throw away a squeeze bottle.

PL: Same thing. We worked with an industrial design team to create version one of our AWSM Sauce dispensers. Essentially there’s an internal reusable gallon-and-a-half shaking jug. You fill that with 6 cups of water, you add in a larger bag of powder, you shake that up, it goes under the hood, and then the pump goes over it.

CS: We did it.

PL: We were Minnesota in April for the first 12 home games, up in the Delta 360 club. It’s a classic entrepreneurial story, where we both have families and we bounced out to Minnesota over the course of the TechStars accelerator and then went back out in April for the pilot that we secured with the Twins. It was taxing, totally worth it, and super-exciting to see people respond to our product. They come up to the dispensers in the stadium and they kind of look — We displaced Heinz Ketchup — and they’re completely happy to put their free ketchup on their hot dog.

CS: Now, we’re decently large guys, so shaking up five cups of water and a pound bag of powder wasn’t a problem. But we did have interns who would go back and do the same thing. It’s totally manageable.

PL: As we think about Philly stadiums, Subaru Stadium for the Union is an interesting one for us. They have sustainability goals, so we hope to connect. It’s a little pie in the sky in some ways, but we’ve also had enough interesting traction and experience. That kind of exposure to put us on a decent path. It’s exciting to see where it’s gonna go from here.