A preacher’s son from Navasota, a hickory pit and a jukebox full of blues.

Stubb’s is a range of barbecue sauces, rubs and marinades named after a real cook, Christopher B. “Stubb” Stubblefield. The Handbook of Texas Online, in an entry by Mary Beth Olson first published in December 2006 and revised in August 2023, says he was born in Navasota, Texas, the son of a Baptist preacher, and that the family moved to Lubbock in the 1930s, where he spent his youth picking cotton and working in local hotels and restaurants. He served in the United States Army during the Korean War: the Handbook says he was a gunner in the Ninety-sixth Field Artillery who also supervised food preparation for soldiers, and The Christian Science Monitor described him in May 1992 as having been made a mess sergeant.

The restaurant came first. According to the Handbook, Stubblefield opened Stubb’s Bar-B-Q in Lubbock in 1968, in a small building at 108 East Broadway. He hung signs reading “There Will Be No Bad Talk or Loud Talk in this Place,” loaded the corner jukebox with blues records, and smoked chicken, ribs, beef brisket and sausage in a hickory pit outside the back door. He also made his own sauce. The Handbook pictures him at work in overalls, a cowboy hat and a white apron.

Music followed the food. The guitarist Jesse Taylor talked Stubblefield into letting him build a stage, the Handbook says, and young West Texas players including Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Terry Allen and Butch Hancock played there; Sunday night jam sessions became a tradition. Stubblefield himself would sometimes take the microphone to sing “Summertime,” according to both the Handbook and the Monitor. The Monitor gave his motto as “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m a cook!”, and the Handbook records that he always described himself as “just a cook.”

Austin, a Letterman appearance and whiskey bottles corked with jalapeños.

The restaurant did not last in Lubbock. The Handbook says that by the mid-1980s Stubblefield had run into financial problems, closed the East Broadway location and followed his musician friends to Austin. There he served barbecue at the blues club Antone’s, and then opened his own barbecue and live-music place on Interstate 35 North in 1986, which he closed in 1989. Tasting Table, in a history of the sauce published in May 2024, gives 1985 for the Austin reopening.

The sauce was already travelling. Tasting Table reported, citing an interview Ely gave to NPR, that Ely and fellow musicians encouraged Stubblefield to make extra sauce so they could sell it for him, and called themselves the “IRS: Idiots Rescuing Stubb.” The same article says Ely took a bottle of the sauce with him on an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, and that Letterman later brought Stubblefield onto the show. The Monitor reported in 1992 that Letterman had brought him to New York to feed a studio audience.

Production at first was small. Tasting Table says Stubblefield cooked the sauce by hand in a 60-gallon cooker, stirred with a paddleboat oar, and filled empty Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottles with their labels removed, using jalapeños as corks. Later, the Handbook says, he began to market his sauce and other products with business partners, through Stubb’s Legendary Kitchen in Austin. Tasting Table dates the arrival of the first two flavours, Original and Spicy, on grocery shelves to 1992. In May of that year the Monitor reported that Texans could buy Stubb’s Bar-B-Q sauce in grocery stores, and quoted Stubblefield: “My life is in those bottles.”

Stubblefield died on 27 May 1995, according to the Handbook of Texas, which says his partners bought the historic building at 801 Red River Street in Austin that same day to continue his barbecue and live-music tradition. The Handbook also records that a life-size bronze statue of him by the artist and musician Terry Allen was dedicated at the original East Broadway site in Lubbock in 1999, that a Stubb’s Bar-B-Q Cookbook was published in 2007, and that he was inducted into the Austin Music Memorial in 2009.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are barbecue and steak sauces, condiments sold in bottles on supermarket shelves and set out on restaurant tables. They are bought quickly and used often, so a bottle in this category usually has to be recognised at arm’s length, among many similar bottles in the same aisle, by its shape, its colour and the name on the label.

That is why identity in this part of the grocery trade tends to rest on a few repeated signals rather than on the sauce itself. A wordmark, a founder’s name or face, a place name, a slogan or a short run of letters can travel from bottle to advertisement to recipe card, while the bottle changes size, material and cap many times over the years and new flavours are added beside the original.

The companies behind these names have often changed hands, been folded into larger food groups or moved where their sauces are made, so each guide asks plain questions: who started the brand, who owns it now, where the sauce is made and how its labels have been presented. Each separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

A Maryland spice company, a Texas sauce and a cook’s portrait on the can.

The brand has had a corporate owner since 2015. The Baltimore Sun reported on 20 August 2015 that McCormick & Co., the spice and flavourings company based in Sparks, Maryland, had completed its acquisition of the Texas maker of Stubb’s sauces, buying all of the shares of the privately held One World Foods Inc.; McCormick had announced the deal on 24 June. The paper said the sauces, marinades, rubs and skillet sauces were expected to complement McCormick’s grilling products sold under the Grill Mates, Lawry’s and McCormick names. McCormick has owned Stubb’s since 2015, and in October 2026 the Stubb’s website carries a One World Foods, Inc. copyright line and lists Stubb’s among McCormick’s brands, alongside Frank’s RedHot, Cholula and Old Bay.

The range has grown well beyond the two sauces of 1992. The website, read in October 2026, lists barbecue sauces including Original, Spicy, Hickory Bourbon and Smokey Mesquite, alongside rubs, marinades, a hickory liquid smoke and canned baked beans, which it marks as new. It also promotes licensed snacks, including Herr’s potato chips and cheese curls flavoured with Stubb’s barbecue sauce. The site keeps the restaurant’s spelling, “Bar-B-Q,” in product names, and uses the line “BBQ the Way It Ought to Be.”

The founder stays on the package. The company’s own product description for its Original baked beans says the can carries a label with a portrait of C. B. Stubblefield, and its pages describe the brand’s beginnings as a “mom and pop BBQ pit” filled with smoke and music.

For a design guide, Stubb’s shows how a grocery brand can be built on the name, words and face of one cook and the music that grew up around his pit. Compare McCormick, its owner since 2015, and Frank’s RedHot, another sauce in McCormick’s portfolio. For this guide we use a hickory brown, a sauce red and an apron cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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