We recently connected with Rickie Cox and have shared our conversation below.

Rickie , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Milton and I had a catering business. We had other jobs also, So we did catering on the side. Jobs start picking up and working both full-time jobs and running a catering business was really wearing us down. We couldn’t find no one to hire, because no one cooks with love and take care of our business like we do. Being 2 middle aged men.. we said it has to be and easier way to make some money without running ourselves in the ground. So one day we came with the idea.. we have to find a product within our catering that we can put on the shelves while we are at work. So we thought about the homemade BBQ sauce that we were making… went home and after a couple of weeks… we perfected it. The taste that Milton came up with was amazing. I looked him in the face and said brotha… that’s it you keep stirring the pot and I will get this bottled up and we split everything 50/50.. and that’s how the idea 💡 became a real product

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When I was in the 10th grade I worked at a McDonald’s and was the assistant manager by the 11th grade in West Oakland ca. My business partner Milton Johnson started @ everett and Jones barbecue resturant when he was in the 10th grade and stayed there for damn near 18 years.. so he definitely knew what he was doing on the grill… years later I was working at the port of Oakland and Milton have moved on from Everett and Jones. I was a single man making good money on the port but my taxes was killing me and I end up owing over 30k in taxes.. I ask my taxman how is this happening to me? He told me that I need to buy a house get some dependents or start a business. My roommate just moved out and got married. Milton needed a place to stay.. wasn’t with his child’s mother anymore and working part time.. I asked him to move in with me and for my 40th birthday I asked if he can bbq for me at the park. As we were getting things together we saw we were catering and it came sooo natural. We decided.. if they like the food… we will have some business cards an tell them we cater. From there and onslaught of jobs came. The catering company was called KISS THE CHEF DIVINE CATERING. Our slogan was food so good make you wanna kiss the chef. From there this idea and business led to the next idea of turning kiss the chef into the Philty Milty All Purpose Barbecue Sauce.
What sets our sauce apart from everyone else is that you can really put this sauce on everything from eggs to potatoes rice noodles salads plain potatoes chips beans spaghetti and of course all meats. Milton has been making sauce since he was 15 yrs old and have a way of blending theses herbs to where our new slogan is..THE MOST ADDICTIVE SAUCE IN THE WORLD. we are now in 45 stores around the bay area online at Walmart and Amazon

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

#1 We really believe we have an amazing product. We told ourselves that we can’t say we have the best sauce in the world.. because you can have one person just say. ” my moma sauce better than yours” or get in a competition and come in 10th place.. so we said..”We have the most addictive sauce in the world 🌎 ” now the play is.. if they come back and want some more. So we feel we have a really good slogan a damn good product and when we goto our meat markets and grocery stores.. we give all our stores little 2 oz jars to give to the customers for free so they can taste it.. once they taste it.. that’s how we reel them in.. alot of times we are there to pass out the samples.. they see Milton’s face on the bottle and see that we are from Oakland we have out street smarts.. we can relate to our crowd we are the most HUMBLE GUYS. Very approachable and we will give a person a bottle just to reel them in.. sometimes I feel we give away too much free bottles.. but we need people to taste this sauce so we throw it up to our marketing investments. We are not flashy we will talk to people about any topic and for those reasons people will say… hey yall some cool dudes I’m going to give it a try.. then we let them know all our social media pages people call our business line and we will run a conversation with them like we know the people.. we sponsor different groups and young artist or athletes to wear our hoodies and we are the first ones to put on our post other small businesses trying to make it.. so our support comes back full fold. We want to create smiles on people faces and when we do that.. and don’t try to be money money money.. but a slow grind and enjoy the journey.. this is what make our climb strong sturdy and steady over the last 5 yrs. We are still a big work in progress.. we just entered being noticed by a major store out here in northern California Safeway/ Albertsons… and we are just getting our paperwork for a national distribution food service to supprr our brand so we are still striving for the main goal to take down Sweet Baby Rays as America’s #1 Selling sauce

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We are still going through the resiliency now.. Milton cartridges in his neck has deteriorated and now he had titanium rods in his neck.. Milton is a big strong guy.. whom now can lift over 5 lbs.. our cook can’t cook.. I bought a beautiful 10 by 10 canapé and we can’t even use it right now we can’t do any cookouts or festivals farmer markets that we can showcase our sauce.. but we are still in good spirits and what he can do is goto the stores.. talk to the customers get us in new stores as I goto work he’s on permanent disability and still haven’t received a check.. but every day we find a way to get in another store.. we aren’t moving as fast as we could because of his health issues but we are slowly getting out. To where I’m doing this interview with you right now. Also we had alot and still having trouble launching our product on Amazon.. be we are working those kinks out.
We are about to be in partnership with Safeway but.. there was an issue.. on our bottles 2 of our products have the same barcodes and we have over a 1000 bottles.. so Safeway told us we had to fix it.. we were like… oh noooo so we didn’t do a thorough final check on our labels and the Lil mom and pop stores never caught it .. we the owners didn’t catch it before mass production.
Now we are stuck with products with the same UPC numbers… so what do we do? We are having this print shop make new little barcode stickers so we can stick the right barcode over each and every bottle.. so we are still in the process of opening up all 600 cases with 12 bottles in each and put the stickers on the label so we can KEEP GOING . TALK ABOUT RESILIENCE.. WHEW .. it’s an ongoing learning experience

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.philtymilty.com
• Instagram: @philtymiltybbq
• Facebook: Philty milty all purpose barbecue sauce
• Twitter: @philtymilty
• Youtube: Philty Milty Co.
• Yelp: Philty Milty Co.
• Other: Tik tok @philtymilty

Image Credits
I would like to thank god for giving us the vision strength and resiliency to keep going. I would like to thank my business partner and CEO Milton Johnson for creating the most addictive sauce in the world 🌎