Carl Starkey

Post-pitch story

Carl Starkey and Paul Lehmann founded AWSM Sauce in 2021 with a simple sustainability idea: ketchup and barbecue sauce shipped as powder in a packet, so you add the water at home and skip shipping heavy bottles around the country. When they pitched on the show in early 2023, they'd already raised a $120,000 pre-seed and earned a spot in the Minnesota Twins Accelerator by Techstars — a fitting program for a condiment company, and it paid off literally: in 2024, AWSM worked with Studio MLM to install a custom commercial sauce dispenser at Target Field, the Twins' stadium. Today the company is still a small operation — about five employees, based in West Chester, Pennsylvania — selling its "powder-to-pour" ketchup, BBQ and Chesapeake Fire sauces through its own website while pursuing private-label and B2B deals. There's been no big funding round or exit, and no shutdown either: just a bootstrapped condiment startup still grinding away at one of the hardest categories in consumer goods. For a product most people assumed was a gimmick, AWSM Sauce is still on the shelf.