Chicago, 1985, and which bottle is behind the link
Sweet Baby Ray’s comes from Chicago. According to the manufacturer’s company history, a cook who appears there only as Chef Larry finished developing the family recipe for a sweet and tangy BBQ sauce in 1985 and won the Mike Royko Rib-off with it, against almost 700 entrants. According to the manufacturer, that one sauce has since grown into more than 30 varieties.
Before we get to ingredients, one point that matters when ordering. Our data sheet lists the product as Barbecue Sauce 510 g, and this review describes the variety the manufacturer calls Original Barbecue Sauce. The Amazon listing behind our buy button, however, is titled “Barbecue Soße, süß und würzig”, and the product photo shows a label reading “Sweet ’n Spicy Barbecue Sauce”. On the US site that is a separate variety. We therefore assume that this link brings you the Sweet ’n Spicy, not the Original.
We have no manufacturer data for the Sweet ’n Spicy. All ingredients and nutrition values in this text come from the product page of the Original. If you want exactly that variety, look at the label photo of the listing before you order.
According to the Amazon catalogue, the bottle weighs approx. 0.5 kg and measures approx. 18.6 x 9.7 x 5.3 cm, and the contents are given as 510.3 g. The photo shows a slim bottle with a tapered neck and a white lid. What material it is made of is not stated in any of our sources.
What is on the Original’s ingredients list
Ingredients lists name the components in descending order by weight, in the US as in the EU. For the Original, four ingredients come before all others: high fructose corn syrup, distilled vinegar, tomato paste and modified corn starch. The rest follows after the note that each of these ingredients makes up less than 2%.
This group contains salt, pineapple juice concentrate, natural smoke flavour, spice, caramel colour, molasses, sodium benzoate as a preservative, dried garlic, mustard flour, corn syrup, sugar, tamarind, natural flavour and celery seed.
Three things stand out. The molasses, which appears as the basis of the sauce in some descriptions, belongs to the trace amounts. The smoke comes into the bottle as a flavouring, not via a smoked ingredient. And sweetening happens several times over: besides the corn syrup in first place, further down there is also plain corn syrup, sugar, molasses and the pineapple concentrate. For the sour side, which the manufacturer describes with the word tangy, tamarind and pineapple juice contribute alongside the vinegar in second place; both bring fruit acid.
The modified starch is a thickener and therefore the component that binds the sauce. The manufacturer does not quantify how thick the sauce ends up, and it says just as little about the heat level. EU food law translates the term High Fructose Corn Syrup, depending on the mixing ratio, as glucose-fructose syrup or fructose-glucose syrup. Which designation is on the German label of the imported bottle, we could not check.
In detail: why a sugar sauce only belongs on the grate at the end
Sugar browns under heat, and past a certain point it burns. Fructose caramelises at a lower temperature than household sugar, so a sauce with a fructose-rich syrup in first place tips from glossy to black faster over direct embers than a vinegar-led one. Bitter, charred spots then form on the surface while the meat underneath is still cooking.
Sweet Baby Ray’s draws that conclusion itself. The manufacturer’s FAQ says you should brush the food in the last 5 to 10 minutes on the grill or under the oven grill, because the sauce can burn at high temperatures.
For ribs that means: the long cooking phase runs without sauce. Our guide to the 3-2-1 method for spare ribs glazes in the last hour in two to three layers, at a cooking chamber temperature of 110 to 130 °C. The manufacturer’s note is aimed at high temperatures; if you grill hotter, stick to its shorter window. On a gas grill we would put the meat in the indirect zone for brushing, that is over a switched-off burner. There the glaze sets without the flame reaching the sugar directly.
For burgers and sausages, which only lie on the grill for a few minutes anyway, the timing shifts accordingly to the last turn.
How much sugar is in a serving?
According to the US nutrition information for the Original, 17 g in 36 g of sauce, which is two tablespoons. 16 g of that is added. Extrapolated, that gives around 47 g of sugar per 100 g, so almost half of the mass.
Based on the US reference amount, the added 16 g correspond to 32% of the recommended daily maximum of added sugar. For sodium the table gives 290 mg per serving, 13% of the daily requirement by US standards. Converted with the usual factor of 2.5, that is approx. 0.7 g of salt in two tablespoons and around 2 g of salt per 100 g. This conversion is ours; we did not find a salt figure per 100 g in the EU format for the imported bottle.
It is interesting to compare this with the Amazon description, which speaks of “slight sweetness”. At 47 g of sugar per 100 g, we would not use the word slight. However, that sentence appears in the listing whose photo shows the Sweet ’n Spicy, so it need not refer to the Original.
Price, quantity and what a serving costs
The bottle costs approx. €7 (Amazon page on 21 October 2026: €6.80). At 510 g that works out to approx. €1.33 per 100 g. If you divide the bottle into the 36 g servings of the US label, you get a good 14 servings and around 50 cents per serving.
For comparison with the two other sauces in the table below: Bull’s-Eye is given in millilitres, Sweet Baby Ray’s and Stubb’s in grams. A millilitre of sauce does not weigh exactly a gram, so we do not calculate the unit prices against each other. The plain quantity is still clear: 300 ml for the Bull’s-Eye against 510 g here and for the Stubb’s.
How much you use per barbecue evening depends on what you grill and cannot be put into a figure seriously. A limit is set by the shelf life after opening, more on that below.
What the manufacturer does not state
Collected in one place, so you know what you cannot rely on: there is no German or European manufacturer site, and so the EU label of the 510 g bottle, the German ingredients list, nutrition values per 100 g and the name of the importer are missing; whether the imported product matches the US recipe is not documented. Also open are the bottle material and closure type, the best-before period of the unopened bottle, the filling location and the company that owns the brand. The home page advertises “Award-Winning” and calls the brand the “#1 BBQ sauce in America”, without naming any award other than the 1985 Rib-off or a source for the top position. We therefore do not adopt either claim.
What else is worth considering?
| Product | Type and quantity | Price | Our rating | Choose this if |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce (this one) | BBQ sauce, 510 g | approx. €7 | 8.7 | you want a sweet glaze for the last minutes on the grill |
| Bull’s-Eye Original BBQ Sauce | BBQ sauce, 300 ml | approx. €7 | 8.4 | you can manage with a smaller bottle |
| Stubb’s Original Bar-B-Q Sauce | BBQ sauce, 510 g | approx. €10 | 8.7 | you want a Texas-style sauce rather than one from Chicago |
| Don Marco’s Pork Powder Rub | Dry rub, 630 g pouch | approx. €27.90 | 9.4 | you want to season pork before cooking |
The prices are guide values from our price boxes and change. The rating is our editorial assessment based on the available data; identical numbers for Sweet Baby Ray’s and Stubb’s do not mean a tie in taste, which we cannot judge.
When this sauce suits you and when another does
In its FAQ, Sweet Baby Ray’s names chicken, steak, ribs, hamburgers, pork, hot dogs, french fries and sausages as uses, plus use as an ingredient in recipes. The Original’s product page lists, among others, Easy Baby Back Ribs, Sticky Ribs, a Pulled Pork Bread Bowl, a BBQ-Glazed Meatloaf and BBQ Steak and Potato Skewers. Ribs are one item among eight there.
Whether it suits you is decided mainly by the sugar. If you watch added sugar, a sauce with the sugar value above is the wrong choice, even if you brush sparingly. In that case a homemade sauce is the more honest route, because you decide the sweetness yourself.
If you want to season pork before cooking and want a crust rather than a glaze, a dry rub is the right tool. The Don Marco’s Pork Powder Rub is in the price box at approx. €27.90, this bottle at approx. €7, but the rub comes with 630 g in the pouch, and it is applied before grilling, not after. The two do not exclude each other: rub for seasoning, sauce for the last minutes.
If you only need a bottle now and then, take a look at the Bull’s-Eye. It is in the price box at approx. €7 but contains considerably less at 300 ml. The Stubb’s costs approx. €10 for 510 g.
Mustard and celery allergies are a hard exclusion; both are in the ingredients list. And if you explicitly want the Original: going by the product photo, our Amazon link will probably get you a different variety. You can find the overall overview of BBQ sauces and rubs in the category Rubs & Sauces.
After opening: fridge, four months, clean brushes
The manufacturer recommends chilling the sauce after opening for the best quality. Elsewhere in the FAQ it is more explicit: after opening, the sauce should not be kept longer than 4 months and should always be refrigerated.
There is also a hygiene note, quoted word for word: never put dirty or used utensils such as basting brushes into the bottle, and do not pour used sauce back into the bottle.
In practice that means you pour the amount for the barbecue evening into a small bowl beforehand and brush from that. Whatever is left in the bowl after grilling does not go back. As a general rule: a brush that has touched raw meat does not belong on cooked food again until it has been cleaned.
With this time limit and the serving count from the price section, one bottle lasts almost exactly to the end at three to four servings a month. If you grill less often, you are better served by a smaller bottle.
