Veteran's BBQ sauces are smokin'

HUNTLEY, Ill. — When it comes to the success of his Veteran’s Q line of barbecue sauces and rubs, Steve Lulofs didn’t mean for any of it to happen.

“Everything we have done so far has been done — not by mistake — but just by winging it,” Lulofs said.

That started with the development of the first Veterans Q barbecue sauce, the Original. Lulofs and his wife, Robin, and brother, Scott, had formed their own barbecue competition team and entered a local barbecue competition in September 2015.

“I thought you had to make your own sauces and rubs for the competition. I didn’t know you could just use stuff from the store,” he said.

The team took second place out of 62 teams.

Lulofs’ barbecue and smoking skills themselves were learned straight from YouTube, and his expanded interest in barbecuing and smoking also happened by chance when he won some money in a March Madness basketball pool.

“I thought I’d get a smoker. I researched first-time smokers, what’s the best and found one online that was highly recommended and happened to be a veteran-owned company, so I went ahead and bought that smoker. I taught myself how to smoke food. My whole entire barbecue career is 100% learned off of YouTube. I’m a YouTube cook. I watched videos and then just cooked for practice,” Lulofs said.

The smoker he bought was a Pit Barrel Cooker. The Pit Barrel Cooker Co., headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, was founded by Noah Glanville, a U.S. Navy veteran, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To practice for the competition, Lulofs had family, friends and neighbors provide quality assurance.

“We had ribs a couple of times a month, and I would have my friends and neighbors and family members come over and give me their honest feedback,” he said.

When he started to develop the sauces and rubs into separate products, he did the same.

“I would make a sauce or a rub and have people try it and then have people give me written feedback. I made changes to it until I settled on what I have now,” he said.

After finding a local company to produce and bottle his recipes in larger quantities, Lulofs had the company make 750 bottles of his Original sauce. Since the sauce has a two- to three-year expiration date, Lulofs figured he’d be able to sell that many bottles in an extended period of time.

“I thought we would maybe sell a couple hundred a year. We ended up selling out in two months,” he said.

Lulofs incorporated Veterans Q in October 2017.

Word of mouth on social media, primarily on Facebook, from friends and neighbors and others who had tasted the Veterans Q sauces, helped get the word out about Lulofs new venture. Small grocery stores also asked to sell the products.

“A couple of mom-and-pop stores saw that we were selling it and people tagged us in Facebook posts, so some of those smaller stores called and asked if they could get the products to sell in their stores. I thought I can sell a few cases, so I went to a few grocery stores around our area and they took us in, too,” Lulofs said.

Selling the barbecue sauces and rubs isn’t Lulofs’ full-time job; he works for the U.S. Department of Labor. The competition barbecue and everything that’s grown up from that is a hobby, so that allows Lulofs to help out his fellow military veterans.

Enlisting while he was a student at Northern Illinois University, Lulofs served in the U.S. Army Reserves from 2002 to 2010. He was deployed to Iraq, attached to the U.S. Army First Cavalry Division, from 2003 to 2005.

His time in the military taught him patience, which is one of the things necessary for good barbecue.

“You learn to be very detail oriented, and you learn to be patient. That’s what I use in our competitions. You have to be very patient with barbecue. It takes hours to cook something, so you need a lot of patience,” he said.

Lulofs started his custom of donating to veterans’ causes with the first money the team won for first place in a barbecue competition in 2016.

“We won $100. It was nice, but we didn’t need the money, so we thought, we’ll just donate it to a veterans’ organization. When I started making and selling the barbecue sauce, I didn’t think I was going to make more than a few hundred dollars, so I thought, it’s just cool that people are buying our sauce, we’ll just donate the proceeds and that’s how the whole donation thing happened,” he said.

With the increasing success of the Veterans Q barbecue sauces and rubs, Lulofs has kept that up.

“As far as integrity, for me, it’s keeping things the same through the entire mission and making sure we donate to veterans’ groups, that we don’t just say that we do that, but that we actually do it,” he said.

For now, the competition barbecue season is on hold due to COVID-19. Lulofs also has a part-time catering business under the Veterans Q name.

“The formal catering part started last year. We always did it for friends, but last year we started doing it for the public. We started by doing pop-up events at local breweries, and now we cater weddings and events,” he said.

While he has had to add additional staff, Lulofs said the business has continued through the pandemic.

“We had to hire extra people to serve because people can’t serve themselves now, but it’s been good. We don’t go too far, distance-wise,” he said.

Lulofs only caters in the local area around Huntley, and the company only does catering for weddings at the Lincoln Farmstead venue in Huntley.

For more information on Veterans Q barbecue sauces and rubs and catering, go to veteransq.com or call 630-901-2769.

For more information on Pit Barrel Cookers, go to pitbarrelcooker.com or call 502-228-1222.