How we test BBQ sauces

Discovery

We start from a hand-curated brand list — currently 72 manufacturers, chosen to cover the high-intent BBQ-sauce keyword clusters (sugar-free, Carolina, Alabama white, Korean, Japanese, Kansas City, Texas, and the major brand-name searches). Every brand's homepage is verified before it enters the list.

For each brand we then either crawl the storefront's product index directly (Shopify products.json, sitemap, or category page), or auto-detect a catalog URL when the homepage isn't itself a catalog (e.g. McCormick-owned brands hosted on the corporate site).

Classification

Every discovered URL is classified by an LLM gate against a strict schema: is this a BBQ sauce, or is it merch, a rub, a marinade kit, a gift card, or a bundle of multiple SKUs? The gate runs against page metadata plus a short snippet of the page body, so we don't pay extraction cost on URLs that won't ever be exported. Bundles and variety packs are flagged separately and excluded from consumer-facing rankings because they have no single-bottle ingredients or nutrition to verify against.

Extraction

Each classified sauce runs through a multi-step extract agent. The product page HTML is parsed for structured data (JSON-LD, microdata, Shopify variant payloads) for unambiguous fields — brand, name, GTIN, product images. Ingredients and nutrition come from the published label text where the merchant exposes it, or from OCR on the label image when they don't. Heat, sweetness, smoke and style ratings are synthesized by an LLM with explicit confidence scores, audited against the controlled vocabulary in our schema.

When the merchant doesn't publish a label and OCR doesn't recover one, we fall back to Open Food Facts. Every externally-sourced field gets a status of external and a citation on the sauce page.

Web opinion synthesis

For each sauce we search the open web for independent reviews — major retailers, food blogs, BBQ forums, recipe sites. Cited passages and ratings are aggregated by an LLM into a structured opinion digest with a consensus rating, sentiment, pros, cons, and direct quotes attributed back to source URLs. This is the input the editorial pick-ranking uses when a guide doesn't specify a strict numeric sort.

Brand enrichment

Brand pages get a separate enrichment pass that gathers a short editorial summary, founding facts, and notable distinctives from the brand's own homepage, its about page, and its Wikipedia article when one exists. Every field is nullable — if the sources don't clearly state it, the brand page shows nothing rather than something the LLM invented.

Ranking

Guide rankings use the criterion the guide is named after — lowest sugar for keto guides, lowest carbs for low-carb guides, web-opinion consensus rating for style guides. Sauces that don't meet a guide's quality gate (verified or OCR-captured nutrition and ingredients where the gate requires it) are excluded entirely.

All sauces ship with a "captured at" timestamp visible on the sauce page, and every guide shows a "last updated" date driven by the newest capture in its pick set. Formulations change; we re-crawl the source brands periodically and label drift will resurface as updated rankings.

Affiliate disclosure

Some retailer-search links on sauce pages are affiliate-tagged. Affiliate revenue does not influence rankings — rankings are computed before any monetization layer is applied, and the editor override system never sees attribution data.