Local man creates Ketchup2

LERAYSVILLE - A stone's throw from Christiansen's Tire & Alignment Center in the Endless Mountains of north central Pennsylvania, an inventor and amateur chef believes he has, at long last, concocted the ultimate barbecue sauce. Robert "Bert" Christiansen thinks he's "onto something" big.

His chocolate-colored elixir - the end result of months of culinary trial and error in Christiansen's home kitchen - is called Ketchup2, or K2, and the 46-year-old bachelor who created it plans to market the sauce to national and international consumers.

"Ketchup2 makes everything taste better," declares the label on the 12-ounce, high-shouldered bottle. "Covers all bases - ketchup, BBQ sauce, hot sauce."

For more than three decades, Christiansen and his family have operated a tire business in rural Bradford County and upstate New York. Christiansen, who lives two houses away from the tire center, continues to bank royalties on his invention that allows you to poke an extended rod through the bumper of an SUV or pickup truck and lower the spare tire stored beneath the rear chassis.

After licensing that handy tool, he turned to new challenges and the prospect of even more royalties.

"I'm a very avid griller," explained Christiansen, a local good ol' boy with a thick mustache and large clumps of salt-and-pepper hair cascading from under the back of his John Deere baseball cap. "I built my own smoker and made my own spices and dry rubs, but I was always disappointed with store-bought barbecue sauces. I was never happy with their taste or how they stuck to the meat."

So he began a lengthy and rather expensive quest, working the entire summer of 2008 with scores of ingredients and cuts of pork, beef and chicken virtually on a daily basis to create various sauces on the propane stove in his house.

Like a scientist in a laboratory, and surrounded by bottles, cans, cartons, flavorings and spices, Christiansen launched his experiment with the willing assistance of family and friends, who gathered in the evenings and on weekends to sample the latest efforts.

"It was often an all-day process - making a batch, then smoking ribs for more than four hours to try the sauce on them," he explained. "Some of the sauces I made were too sweet, some too spicy, some too hot. I continued to tweak it. Then when people started saying, 'This is great!' I knew I was on to something. When I finally got it right, I began making up small batches and giving it away to friends for free."

Christiansen obviously isn't going to divulge precisely what it was that he "finally got right." But the K2 label lists a plethora of ingredients that include brown sugar, unsulphured molasses, chipotle chili peppers, black mustard seed, tamarind extract, garlic powder, apple cider vinegar, honey, aged cayenne red peppers and various other "spices."

Christiansen now had the formulation he sought, but he lacked FDA approval to sell his condiment.

With an eye toward eventually marketing the product, he looked for "a fancy bottle" that would immediately grab a customer's eye when he or she walked down the supermarket aisle. In Elmira, N.Y., where he owned a retail tire store until last year, the entrepreneur strolled into a liquor store and spotted Chopin potato vodka in a tall, thin bottle. Voila! He was off to a bottle-supply company to produce something similar. (My ever-practical better half opined that the K2 bottle was too tall to fit easily into the refrigerator. Christiansen conceded that he's heard similar concerns. "We may have to tweak the bottle before we go national," he said.)

Of course, any new barbecue and hot sauce requires a sassy, down-home name. Brainstorming sessions with family members produced such rejects as "Uncle Bert's Steak Sauce" and "Uncle Bert's Finishing Sauce." "The name just kept evolving," Christiansen recalled. "I thought about many names, but I wanted to link it to something 'known' like ketchup. I believe that, with the unique shape of the bottle, a very cool label (it's an attractive combination of blue, green, white and red), and the name Ketchup2, the product will sell itself from the shelf as the consumer shops."

The next step was to travel about two hours northeast of his home to Nelson Farms in Cazenovia, N.Y., and arrange for commercial bottling of the sauce. Nelson Farms, according to its Web site, is a "one-stop processing facility for small scale food processors, farmers, growers and producers."

Christiansen is now in what he describes as "the launch phase" of marketing K2. He recently placed an ad for the sauce in the Robb Report magazine, a publication that modestly calls itself "the definitive authority on connoisseurship for ultra-affluent consumers." As a result of the ad, he is selling 12-bottle cases of Ketchup2 for $100, plus shipping and handling, to buyers around the country who reach him at rkchristiansen@frontiernet.net or by phone, (570) 744-1100.

One of the few places selling K2 presently in his home county of Bradford is the Red House Bakery and Deli on Route 706 in Stevensville, Pa., about 10 miles away. There, a bottle retails for $5.99. Last October, the bakery introduced its K2 Sandwich - slow-roasted pork, cheddar cheese, caramelized onions, bacon and Christiansen's sauce served on panini-style bread with chips and a pickle for $5.95. Adrian Dreisch, brother of owner Mike Dreisch, says the sandwich has been selling well, but he could not provide actual figures.

Recently, Christiansen placed 12 bottles of K2 at his older brother's tire center up the road. "With the first real snow of the season, the store was packed every day with customers," he said. "There was no price, no advertisement, no banner, nothing but 12 bottles of K2 sitting near the cash register. I just wanted to see how curious people would be. The 12 bottles sold immediately. In fact, my brother was initially annoyed because he was so busy waiting on tire customers that he didn't want to be bothered talking about K2."

To borrow a phrase from a famous chef, Christiansen is looking to kick it up a notch. "I want to find an investor who recognizes that K2 is going to be the next billion-dollar product on store shelves," he said. "I want to license it and bring the price down because we can't sell it cheaply right now. It really should be selling for $2.99 a bottle."

So, what does it taste like? I did a head-to-head test against my favorite barbecue sauce, the Chicago-based Sweet Baby Ray's, on chicken. The Windy City product was smooth and smoky, but it lacked the depth of flavor and finish of heat that Ketchup2 offered. And K2 is a more versatile sauce that can be employed in many other culinary venues than barbecue. In recent weeks I've used it on roast duck and even fried oysters in place of tartar or cocktail sauce, although in retrospect beer would have been a better choice than the muted Muscadet I drank with the bivalves.

Christiansen believes in his product with almost messianic fervor. "K2 really does make everything taste better, just like our label says," he asserted. "I use it on everything, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is the best steak sauce money can buy - and I've had them all, including Peter Luger's and A1.

"I was doing a stir fry a couple of weeks ago, first with pork, peppers and onions and then with chicken. I decided to try some K2 instead of soy sauce, and it just blew me away. It was the best stir fry I ever had."

George Ingram is a freelance writer.