The Shelf Audit Files No. 07 — Your Cookout

Look at the grill. The bag of charcoal, the bottle of barbecue sauce, the little jar of seasoning you shake over everything. A folksy name, a date from decades ago, a pitmaster on the label who looks like he has been smoking brisket since before you were born.

Almost none of it belongs to a backyard. The charcoal, the sauce, the seasoning, the ketchup, the mustard, the hot dogs — most of that table traces back to three enormous companies. And the best-selling barbecue sauce in the country, the one most of us grab without thinking, belongs to a fourth.

This book names all four, with the deal and the date attached to each one, and then hands you six brands that are genuinely Black-owned, still independent, and on a shelf you can reach this week. It is a buying guide about who owns the company and what it costs. It is not about how anything tastes, and it never will be.