Stevia Sweet

Sugar has become the Michael Jackson of the food world. We’ve heard all the negative news, we don’t want to give it to our kids, we know we’re supposed to be mad at it, but it just keeps turning out hit after hit.

Chocolate cake? Winner. Glazed doughnut? Irresistible. Ice cream? I mean, come on. Even if you try to avoid it by opting for savory foods over sweeter ones, don’t be fooled into thinking you’re immune to sugar’s shapeshifting ways as it’s used to flavor everything from spaghetti sauce and salad dressing to one of America’s worst offenders: barbecue sauce.

That last bit proved to be quite a conundrum for Bob Overholser, who—as the owner of Gold Rush BBQ, in Venice—has built his life around barbecue. After being diagnosed with diabetes, he realized that if he wanted that life to keep building, he would need to create a sauce that had barbecue’s distinctive sweet tang without the pitfalls of processed sugar. So he did just that.

“On average, most store-bought barbecue sauce contains a whopping 15–20 grams of sugar per two tablespoons,” Bob informs me. “And worse, many sauces lead with high-fructose corn syrup as their first ingredient.” So, while you’re squeezing that sauce bottle with reckless abandon, you are potentially loading up your plate with upwards of 300 grams of sugar or more. Yeah. Yikes.

“One of the biggest trends happening in food right now is reduced- or zero-sugar options,” says Bob. “Restaurateurs are always saying ‘What can we do to reach customers?’ but they tend to forget about people who want sugar-free meals.”

Thus, Bob created a solution for his corner of the culinary world by creating Stevia Sweet, the first-ever low-sugar barbecue sauce sweetened with stevia extract, which boasts only 1 gram of sugar per two tablespoons while still delivering that delicious sauciness that barbecue lovers crave. You don’t need to be a math whiz to calculate the massive difference there.

“Barbecue, at its core, is supposed to be unprocessed, clean eating,” says Bob. “It’s seasoned, smoked meat—but then we smother it with what is essentially candy canes and corn syrup,” he continues. “It’s not as simple as just leaving the sugar out, as tomato paste is loaded with sugar as well. You can’t just substitute with natural sweeteners like molasses either, and all the thickeners are full of sugar.”

Bob is already changing the barbecue industry and making real-deal restaurant meals a reality for countless folks who desire low-sugar options, but his real goal is to change the world for the children so their generation can put an end to the diabetes and obesity epidemic that currently plagues our society.

“We need to start making food options that allow the children to grow up differently than we are,” Bob says with a mixture of determination and the joy that comes from possibility. He’s hoping to influence the school system to make healthier choices, especially when it comes to condiments as just a few pumps of ketchup or barbecue sauce are enough to put kids over their daily allowance of sugar. “We need to get better options into school cafeterias. If it’s not my sauce, it needs to be somebody else’s,” he adds emphatically.

Bob bets sugar-free is about to be the new gluten-free, regardless of one’s physical conditions, as more and more people are interested in the ingredients they put into their bodies and how diet affects their well-being.

“I made the sugar-free shift in my life because I had to. Doctor’s orders. But you don’t have to have a health issue to make a healthier choice.

Want to try Stevia Sweet for yourself? It’s available all around town from Lucky’s Market to Detweiler’s and several other stops in between and is, of course, available on Amazon, where it ranks number one among low-sugar sauce options.