BAM! The sweet, heavenly taste of barbecue sauce hits Groves students’ taste buds. Curious to know Groves’ favorite BBQ sauce, I created a survey to find out the answer for myself.
The trial sauces used in my survey were Sweet Baby Ray’s (both sweet and spicy), Kroger brand, and Stubbs. I gave students three cups filled with the three sauces and had them try each one without knowing which was which. Students then rated the sauces one through three from best to worst. I made sure no one knew which sauce they were trying, so they were essentially lost in the sauce.
To conduct this experiment, I set up my moving carnival of sauces, and went to each lunch table that I thought seemed interesting. I then poured them into cups and gave them a spoon for each. I interviewed 42 people of all different grades. A lot of the students were very interested in my research, and were very helpful in providing useful data.
The results following this exhilarating experiment were very intriguing. The cheapest sauce I had purchased was Kroger’s brand. This sauce’s ratings started out with a strong lead of three out of four first places. The later crushing defeat of Kroger was unfortunate, but I didn’t believe it was a very strong contender to begin with. Once students tasted the Kroger sauce twice, they realized it really wasn’t all that great and fell into the end of the pack.
The middle priced of the three sauces was Sweet Baby Ray’s. Going into this experiment, many people seemed as though they already knew they would rate Baby Ray’s the highest, but after tasting it without the brand name attached, some of the volunteers actually did not rate it as high as they thought they would’ve.
Students claimed that the third sauce option had a special something that made it stand out from the rest. The third sauce was Stubbs Original. Stubbs was almost overwhelmingly the best-scoring of the three sauces. Stubbs had eight first places and many close seconds. It was the most expensive, but many said that it contained the right amount of both smoky and spicy flavor.
The special twang of this sauce even led Groves student Cooper Sowle to claim that “it was in fact bussin’”.
To sum up the data, the Kroger brand sauce ended up finishing in last place, Sweet Baby Ray’s ended in a very close second, and it turns out Groves students have expensive taste in barbeque sauce because they preferred Stubbs Original BBQ Sauce above all others.
