![]() “We’ve taken all the artificial ingredients out of the bloody mary mix as well as allergens,” says Alex Worthington, who handles all of the production for Barbecue Wife. Thus, the Barbecue Wife Margarita Mix was born. So when Catherine kept finding bloody mary mixes, and margarita mixes, loaded up with additives like MSG, High Fructose Corn Syrup, and other “junk” on the back of labels, Catherine knew people also deserved to make a margarita they could reach for on a sweltering Texas day that tasted good and felt good to drink. Just about every product in the grocery aisle is trying to jump on the health food bandwagon by labeling what’s inside their products - and what isn’t. It’s also where she got the idea to pair her bloody mix with the restaurant's signature barbecue sauce. It was here at Stiles Switch BBQ where she learned the time and care that goes into creating an authentic, homegrown recipe from scratch. This insight into relying on only natural ingredients remained with Catherine after she shifted gears to managing marketing and PR for the family barbecue business in 2011. “I saw in the health food space how to use ingredients that can make a product better and that you don’t always have to go the cheaper route.” “Between those two careers, I learned so much,” she says. She had no idea that this skillset, paired with a decade of experience in PR and marketing at a major media brand and a health food startup respectively, would lead her down a path of creating award-winning cocktail mixers. While studying at Texas A&M, Catherine tended bar to make ends meet and pay for school. But just like a tender bite of Central Texas barbecue, Barbecue Wife’s transformation from kitchen mix to premium craft product was slow, bold, and all about the details. In fact, the blood mary mix was so well-received that Catherine later launched a margarita mix with smoked honey, following the same clean-ingredient philosophy. “That was really the first mixer that helped Barbecue Wife come about.”īorn from the spirit of craft-style barbecue and the family-owned business Catherine and her husband have lovingly built together, Barbecue Wife’s “junk-free,” gluten-free, vegetarian cocktail mixes found a thirsty audience quickly, leading to placement in over 300 retailers across the state. “The flavors married right into my bloody mary mix and we arrived at something that we thought was really exceptional,” Catherine says. She wanted to take her family’s signature sauce and put it behind the bar, effectively turning the Central Texas flavor the Stiles team is known for and melding it with her bloody mary mix, a formula she’s been concocting for fun since college.Īt first sip, a Texas-sized light bulb went off. After Catherine Stiles and her husband Shane opened their first Austin barbecue joint, Stiles Switch BBQ, the creative mom of two saw an opportunity to create something not already done to death in the world of Texas barbecue.
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