Feature article
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For the love of ‘Texas’ Pete
By Fred Sauceman
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The lariat-twirling cowboy and the name on the label pay homage to the Lone Star state. The corporate footprint is pure Tar Heel. And its aggressive promoters operate out of an old department store building in the Volunteer State.
The product is Texas Pete Hot Sauce, always made in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, never in Texas.
On September 11, 2001, Tony Treadway and his staff from Johnson City’s Creative Energy Group, an advertising, marketing, and public relations firm, entered the offices of T.W. Garner Food Company in Winston-Salem just as the first World Trade Center tower in New York City was burning.
“I can’t remember the dates of all my other accounts, but I’ll never forget that one,” says Treadway. “We told company president Reg Garner that we understood if he wanted to reschedule the meeting, but he said no, we had made the trip and should go ahead. So we agreed to present for 15 minutes, and then go watch what was unfolding on television for 15 minutes.”
Treadway founded Creative Energy in 1991, and the following year, the company landed its first food-related clients, Pal’s Sudden Service, which would go on to win a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2001, and Moody Dunbar, America’s largest producer of bell pepper products, headquartered in Johnson City. Together, Dunbar and Creative Energy helped popularize the roasted red pepper in American restaurants. Creative Energy organized California’s pimiento growers into an association and started National Pimiento Month.
From those beginnings, Creative Energy has grown to the point where about 60 percent of the company’s business involves food.
With the help of pepper czar Stanley Dunbar and contacts made through the Southeast Food Processors Association, Creative Energy landed the Texas Pete account.
“Texas Pete had a retail advertising agency, but they were looking for a company with more experience in food service,” says Treadway, who points out that in 2006, more food was eaten away from home in America than at home.
“That was the landmark year. As much money is now spent in restaurants as grocery stores. The food service industry is America’s second largest employer, with $560 billion in sales a year.”
Food service encompasses nursing homes, prisons, schools, fast-food restaurants, all the way up to fine dining establishments. In short, Creative Energy’s role is to place Texas Pete in the kitchens and on the tables and menus of as many of those places as possible through brand awareness.
The 2007 Graphis Advertising Annual recognizes the most effective advertising campaigns from 87 agencies, from a total of about 100,000 worldwide. Creative Energy’s Texas Pete campaign, which involved print advertising, a Web site and a poster series, earned a spot in the publication. The Texas Pete promotion was also named best business-to-business campaign in the southeast by the Ad Federation.
“The folks at Creative Energy have helped Texas Pete expand the brand in the food service business significantly,” says Reg Garner. “We’ve gained market share and picked up new restaurant chain business through their efforts. Their creative approach to the food business makes us proud and captures the essence of our growing brand.”
Texas Pete was on the Treadway family table when Tony was growing up in Unicoi County. He describes it as a working person’s hot sauce, at about half the price of some other brands and, at 1,200 to 1,500 Scoville units, about half as hot.
“In 2006, chicken wings became America’s number-one appetizer,” says Treadway. “Texas Pete is an absolute natural with chicken wings, once a part of the chicken nobody was interested in, but now, especially around the Super Bowl, more expensive than breasts. Texas Pete is also a big part of the Carolina barbecue tradition and has become the official hot sauce of the Big Apple Barbecue in Manhattan.”
Garner’s company dates to 1929 when teenager Thad W. Garner used half his college savings to buy Winston-Salem’s Dixie Pig Barbecue Stand and a handwritten barbecue sauce recipe that came with the purchase. The Garners created their signature hot sauce from scratch, a secret blend of cayenne peppers, vinegar and salt.
Creative Energy ads play up Texas Pete’s “Bold Rush.” One ad depicts a cowgirl using Texas Pete as lipstick. Another was staged at The Burger Bar in Bristol, Virginia, where, as the story goes, singer Hank Williams turned down a meal on the last night of his life, New Year’s Eve, 1952. A man (Creative Energy’s own videographer Shawn Harris) straddles one of the metal-flaked barstools. A bottle of Texas Pete, not a Skoal can, has worn a hole in the back pocket of his blue jeans. Both ads are captioned with what Treadway calls a Creative Energy epiphany, the slogan, “For the Love of Pete.”
“The message suggests that if you don’t have Texas Pete on your tables, your customers will be disappointed, particularly in steakhouses, chicken wing places and barbecue restaurants,” Treadway says.
Posters, based on the ads developed by creative director Marne Brobeck and art director Jason Headrick, are being sent all over the country, to those who visit the Creative Energy-designed Web site (Texaspetefoodservice.com) and join “Pete’s Posse.”
Texas Pete will roll out two new products in retail stores this spring: garlic-flavored and “hotter.” Treadway says they should be appearing in Tri-Cities stores in April or May.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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