How a faceless cowboy and a Johnny Cash-style ballad aim to heat up NC’s Texas Pete
No foodstuff inspires greater loyalty inside Tar Heel borders than Texas Pete, a garnish equally suited for barbecue, Ramen noodles or a finger, a fat bottle of grub enhancement with a Southerner’s polite restraint mixed into its kick.
As a hot sauce, it brings a brand identity as complex as its flavor: named for the Lone Star state but made in Winston-Salem; stocked inside every NC refrigerator but oddly unknown outside the Southeast; fronted by a faceless red cowboy who drifts silently from hot dog to chicken wing, asking no thanks.
To Garner Foods, which whipped up the first batch of Pete in 1929, the time felt ripe for the “Hot Sauce Old Guard” to introduce wider America to its century-old brand getting crowded out by the fire-breathing newcomers with their reaper peppers and names like “Xtreme Regret.”
So Texas Pete will now appear in a new national ad campaign, boosted by a Johnny Cash-style ballad for a jingle and a fleshed-out identity for its cowboy mascot.
Still faceless, still wearing a hat shaped like a traffic cone, Texas Pete now kicks in the doors of boring living rooms, busts through the picket fences of bland backyard cookouts and sends an iconic red bottle flying out of his holster — saving the culinary day.
“Texas Pete!” goes the jingle. “He’ll fix that burnin’ hunk of meat
Texas Pete! With sauce that’s hot and sweet ...’’
Giving shape to the faceless cowboy in ad campaign
This brand enhancement comes thanks to McKinney, the Durham-based advertising agency with the Travelocity “Where is my Gnome?” campaign on its resume.
Will Dean, executive creative director, explains the Pete thinking:
“If you think of cowboys,” he said, “they’re meant to represent a sort of independence and doing it their way, and there’s a sort of adventure and spirit in that.”
They wanted a classic western hero of few words, one who roams from dinner plate to backyard grill, then rides on to wherever dinners taste flat. So the faceless cowboy needed to move around on screen rather than stand frozen in mid-bullwhip crack.
“The hat on the bottle is tall and the proportions are very specific,” he said. “We wanted to maintain that. We looked at ways we could subtly hint there was a character there, and it felt better almost to make that a little mysterious. You could invent that character yourself.”
The song needed to sound like a legend whispered around campfires, where cowpokes drizzled sauce over baked beans.
“We needed a track that felt classic and timeless, something like Dolly Parton,” Dean said. “That was cool, but there was something in the back of our mind that was attached to Johnny Cash, and there’s an old storyteller kind of feeling.”
Where the name Texas Pete came from
The sauce Sam Garner and his family created in Winston-Salem helped carry them through the Depression, especially after his son Thad’s restaurant venture tanked in 1929, leaving them with the secret recipe for what would become Texas Pete.
They reported rejecting a marketing director’s suggestion — “Mexican Joe” — insisting that their sauce bear an American name. Garner shifted the geography of his spicy concoction slightly to the north then glanced at his son Harold, nicknamed “Pete.”
Hence the name.
But nearly 100 years later, Texas Pete suffers from “aisle blindness” in grocery stores stocked with hotter, eye-catching competitors with names reminiscent of severe indigestion and death by fire.
“People’s tastes changed,” said Katie Chaffin, marketing director for Garner Foods. “The way they ate became more global. People experimented more with food. People’s flavor palettes just got hotter.”
But not everybody wants a charred esophagus or an attention-craving sauce that ruins a good rib.
Soon the wider world will feel the legend of Texas Pete — steady, dependable, rational purveyor of vinegar and aged peppers.
They will know he can defend their dinner like “Shane” guards a homesteader, like Marshal Will Kane protects the town from gunslingers arriving at high noon, like an avenger in red.
This story was originally published January 27, 2025 at 5:02 AM with the headline "How a faceless cowboy and a Johnny Cash-style ballad aim to heat up NC’s Texas Pete."