Walmart's Great Value Barbecue Sauce Earns Top Honor in WaPo Taste Test

Walmart’s Great Value brand Original Barbecue Sauce has been named the best tasting best-selling barbecue sauce by the Washington Post, according to a recent taste test conducted by the news outlet.

In the sauce review, Washington Post assembled the 13 best-selling sauces according to market-research firm IRI, included three sauces from private brands: Walmart’s Great Value Original Barbecue Sauce, Whole Foods’ 365 Barbecue Sauce and Trader Joe’s Organic Kansas City Style BBQ Sauce.

The latter two sauces earned the tenth and sixth spots respectively, while Walmart’s sauce was named the best, earning 56 on an 80 point scale. Eight testers  tried on the 13 unlabeled sauces their own and on cubes of unseasoned, roasted chicken breast.

“We did not see this one coming. We would never have predicted that the house brand for the mega-chain where you can buy both a grill itself and the stuff to put on it would be where we’d find our winner,” wrote Emily Heil in the summary article. “But the unlikely champ — high fructose corn syrup and all — won over our panel by not offending anyone (no low scores to drag it down) and by offering a classic flavor profile… While we know we’ll take plenty of heat for crowning a Walmart sauce, the unexpected winner might help assure readers of our methodology. At least, as one editor put it, ‘no one will be able to say it wasn’t a blind test.’"