Our Least Favorite BBQ Sauce Left Us Looking For An Ounce Of Flavor

When you're buying barbecue sauce, whether you want to brush it on a rack of baby back ribs or use it as a dip for chicken fingers, you're after capital-F Flavor. You want something that explodes on your tongue. You want it sweet, you want it smoky, you want it vinegary, you want it just a little bit spicy. That's why we tasted thirteen different brands of barbecue sauce you can buy from the store and ranked them from worst to best — and as you can imagine, the sauce at the bottom, 365 Original Barbecue Sauce, came up way short in the flavor department.

For the uninitiated, 365 is the private label brand for Whole Foods, the organic supermarket chain now owned by Amazon. They have shown up before in our rankings, and the results have been mixed, to say the least. The 365 ketchup fared well in our blind taste test, but the 365 steak sauce was just average — and the less said about the 365 frozen french fries, the better. Barbecue sauce is a pretty firmly established template, but there are still plenty of ways to make it your own, so it was certainly possible for 365 to pleasantly surprise us. But unfortunately, they did not rise to the occasion.

There are a couple of things going for the 365 Original Barbecue Sauce. For one thing, it boasts a "near-perfect rich texture." For another, it uses some decent ingredients, such as utilizing brown sugar instead of the cheaper (and more commonplace) high-fructose corn syrup. But that only throws its lackluster flavor into sharper relief. All those good ingredients, and this is what we get?

Even though there are some specks of seasoning visible when you inspect the sauce, none of it came through in the flavor. "It just tastes like sugar with the slightest sour hint of vinegar, but little else is discernible." It's less expensive than some of the other stuff you'll buy at Whole Foods, but that's not necessarily helpful: Compared to other barbecue sauces, the price point was near the median but if you're looking to save money you're probably not going to shop at Whole Foods in the first place. All in all, you'd be better off with our top choice, Lillie Q's Carolina Barbecue Sauce.