Our History
In the Beginning
The history of 1934 BBQ Sauce is as rich and tantalizing as the sauce itself.
The story began nearly 100 years ago. In the 1900s, when Syrian and Lebanese immigrants in Waco, Texas formed a local organization (The Waco Syrian Lebanese club) to enjoy friendship and raise money for local charities.
The group built a clubhouse on 10 acres near Highway 84 and Hewitt Drive, where members gathered for fellowship.
In 1934, club members hosted their first fundraising event to raise money for charitable projects — a barbecue meal with all the fixings.
That inaugural barbecue was so successful, it became the association’s much-anticipated annual fundraising event, feeding hundreds of thousands of Central Texans for the next six decades
Annual Barbecue
Fredrick Khoury, the owner of 1934 grew up working beside his family and other club members at the fundraisers.
Club members experimented barbecuing meat “low and slow,” at the time the technique was being figured out…..long before the method became mainstream.
These were some of the pioneers of one of the most widely used methods of cooking barbecue today.
Using this process, meat cooks at low temperatures for several hours. The members built three brick barbecue pits to smoke the meat and potatoes. It was a two-day process. The meat smoked all night, then was served at 6 p.m. the following day.
Event organizers wanted to offer barbecue sauce to complement the meal and enhance the flavor of the meat, but bottled sauce was not readily available at the neighborhood grocery stores in 1934.
Fredrick’s grandfather, one of the club’s founding members created a BBQ sauce for the event and it was a hit.
The sauce became a mainstay of the meal from the first barbecue in 1934 until the last barbecue the association hosted in 1991.
Fredrick continued to make the sauce for friends and family knowing one day he might make it available to all.
In 2017, Fredrick and his wife Sandee started the company 1934 to produce the club’s “Original” sauce as well as to pay homage to the year the sauce debuted at the first Waco Syrian Lebanese Club’s barbecue.
1934 manufactures the Original sauce the same today as it was made in 1934 along with three additional flavors as well as their Internationally award winning Bloody Mary mix.
