We recently connected with Victoria Beckford and have shared our conversation below.

Victoria, appreciate you joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

OTR Smokehouse started as a drag racing team called On Top Racing which was shortened to OTR. My husband, Jody Beckford, has a 1982 Mercury Capri that he would take to Norwalk Raceway Park, now called Summit Motorsports Park here in Norwalk Ohio. They would go to the track often and have a great time while running points hoping to move on to the next round. They were quite the team!
Unfortunately we don’t get to the track like we used to but we are hopeful that we will have time to go racing again one day.
When we started planning our BBQ/Smokehouse business we kept the OTR thinking friends and family would maybe recognize the name. It no longer stands for On Top Racing as we felt that would be a strange name for the Smokehouse but thought our ribs are pretty amazing! So now the OTR stands for Oh Those Ribs.
We have had a lot of fun with our patrons and their guesses on what the OTR stood for, most guessed Over The Road which is not a bad guess really. Once we tell them it is for Oh Those Ribs, they whole heartily agreed that was the perfect name as they thought our ribs were top notch as well.

Victoria, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Jody and I lived in Louisiana for 9 years and while we were there we found a love for BBQ/Smoking up some Really Good Food for friends and family.
When we moved back to Ohio, we thought it would be a great opportunity to bring that love of cooking to NW Ohio. We are very excited to slowly introduce our northern friends and family to the Cajun flavor we had grown to love and would surely miss, up here.
We serve a variety of Really Good Food items such as pulled pork, grilled chicken and other well know flavors for patrons to get to know and love our food. We are starting to serve boudin and bread pudding this season as we have perfected the flavor to match what we left in Louisiana.
We also just started hot bottling our 5 amazing BBQ Sauces that are for way more than just BBQ. Literally can use it on anything! Even just mixing it with Ranch for dipping. Sooooo Goood!!
We have our Sweet which some say is too sweet but others drink it with a straw.
Sweet n Spicy which was an accident that we are thankful turned out amazing. The perfect combination of sweet and heat.
Our Spicy is strictly jalapenos and really isn’t that bad, heat wise, it’s there and then poof, gone. Thinking we might rename it to almost spicy or kinda spicy or even white girl spicy.
The next two flavors are for those who like it Hot.
Grant’s Burn Your Arse had ghost, scorpions and reapers. It was created in honor of a dear friend who loved this combination of peppers together and ate them on everything as he liked to sweat while he ate.
The last of our OTR Signature Series BBQ Sauces is Grant’s Exotic. We found some amazing hot exotic peppers at our local nursery and had to give some a try. For this sauce we chose Viper Purple Scorpion, Chocolate Reaper and Blue Ghost. This sauce hits different.
We use a 3 wood blend to create our unique flavor whereas most only use one. We use a hickory, oak and mesquite that helps us to create delicious smoked goodies.
We are a food truck that can set up for any event or even deliver Really Good Food in bulk for self service. We have set up for weddings, graduations, corporate events and more.
We are always willing to speak with people to help them have the best event possible.
We are incredibly proud of our winning best Ribs, best Brisket and best Chicken. We are hopeful to win best Pork soon, fingers crossed! We have competed against some that compete nationally.
We are also huge supporters of our veterans, Each summer we provide a lunch for HOOVES. They have retreats to help those struggling with PTSD. We are so honored to be a small part of their healing process.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In July of 2023, right in the middle of our season, our truck had a catastrophic breakdown.
We had to scrub the rest of our season. We had to invest in a new engine and rebuild the truck. It was a lot of work and really came at the worst time.
We tried to keep going from home but we were unsuccessful.
We continued with our plans as we were in the middle of taking classes and such to start producing our sauces for retail.
It has been a really tough couple of years as 2024 we were able to start rolling again but it felt like we were completely starting over. New locations and such made it difficult to keep a float. With the grace of God we made it through but we are still feeling the sting of 2023’s massive breakdown.
There are far more food trucks now including other BBQ/Smoked meats available but we are hopeful that our patrons will still consider us the best option for their Really Good Food needs.
We have proven ourselves to be dependable and provide excellent food and service and are hopeful for this coming season.
We have a lot of fun things planned, new events, and new food options for patrons to try and hopefully fall in love with as we continue to do our best to serve a variety of options that are different from the other trucks that are similar to us. We see they seem to offer the same items while we are thinking outside the box with offerings of boudin, bread pudding and even lamb. No one else are offering these types of Really Good Food.
We shall see!

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We just started manufacturing our 5 amazing OTR Signature Series BBQ Sauces at our local cooperative kitchen this past winter.
It was quite the process to get to this point, about 5 years.
We started with registering our name as a federal trademark. That took about 2 years.
We had to take an acidity class.
We had to register for bar codes.
We had to get a nutrition facts labels and create a label that would be approved for stores. We hired an outside company but they only provided one option as they thought it was the best one that they came up with…we didn’t like what they created. So I, Victoria, went on Canva and created our labels. I’ve learned a lot about how to create labels and advertising using Canva.
Then become approved for our canning license through the Department of Agriculture.
Now we are able to produce our sauces for retail!
We use a facility called NOCK (Northwest Ohio Cooperative Kitchen) to produce all of our sauces ourselves for now. We are hopeful that we will grow and need to hire help one day. But for now, it is just the 2 of us doing all the things. We are hoping this season will be productive and warrant us investing in a website. For now, we are finding local stores who are willing to carry our product. We have 2 local business selling our sauces so far.
Manufacturing, like any other endeavor, requires loads of regulations and such to go through to get to where we are now.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/otrsmokehouse
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OTRSmokehouse

Image Credits

Victoria Beckford