When Arsha Jones was pregnant with her fourth child, one of her biggest cravings was chicken wings with mambo sauce, a sweet, savory dish that was popular decades ago in Washington, DC restaurants. DC about 30 minutes [away]or he should have brought it back home,” said Jones A businessman.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Capital City Mambo Sauce. Arsha Jones.
Jones grew up enjoying mambo sauce in the 1980s and 1990s. “It was something that was part of the community,” he remembers, with roots in the area dating back to the late 1960s, when Wing-N-Things, a black-owned restaurant located at 7th and Florida Ave NW, helped popularize it. it.
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Eventually, Jones’ quest for mambo sauce became problematic, so he decided to make his own. “About every two weeks, I had this pot that I used, and I made enough king sauce for one meal. And that was it; that was enough to satisfy my cravings,” he says.
“I put out a website and quickly started selling online.”
In those early days, Jones wasn’t trying to start a business. He put together the sauce for his family’s enjoyment – not to promote a marketable product. However, with a background in website design and ecommerce, it wasn’t long before Jones began to wonder if there might be other people out there who wanted easy access to mambo sauce.
So, in 2011, Jones and her husband, Charles, launched a direct-to-consumer business: Capital City Mambo Sauce.
“We never intended this to be a retail product,” Jones said. “I would argue that back then, it was a harder way to get smaller products on grocery store shelves than it is today. Today, there are so many programs and accelerators and things – back then, there wasn’t even that. It wasn’t even a consideration. I put out a website and started selling online.”
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Jones did not grow up in a family of entrepreneurs and says he was on his own when it came to how to grow his small home business. Without foreign capital to fund his business or a wide network to tap into, he took a grassroots approach instead. Jones scanned grocery store shelves for small bottles, “like local barbecue sauce,” and emailed their owners.
“I was like, ‘How did you do X? And how did it get on the store shelf?’ ” Jones explained. “And they would just sit down and answer any kind of questions I had. And that’s really how I jumped over a few of those hurdles, at least in the beginning.”
“One thing about not having resources…is that you just learn to do a lot of these things yourself.”
First, Jones is focused on getting Capital City Mambo Sauce into small retail stores. “I was very dependent on small grocery stores,” Jones said. “Washington, DC is a place that doesn’t have a lot of grocery stores, so people rely a lot on these little mom-and-pop-style stores — corner stores, we call them. They’re like the bodegas of New York.”
Capital City Mambo Sauce was sold in 15 mom-and-pop stores, and placing the product in those smaller stores was successful: Major grocery stores took notice when customers asked why the sauce wasn’t on their shelves. That led a local Shoppers Food retailer to reach out to Capital City Mambo Sauce — and ask what it would take to buy the much-needed product.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Capital City Mambo Sauce
From there, the business continued to grow, eventually turning into a seven-figure brand available in more than 3,000 retailers nationwide, including Walmart, Wegmans, Safeway, Costco and more.
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Capital City Mambo Sauce continues to grow at a rate of 25% year over year thanks to a mixed marketing strategy that extends into fast food chains and sports arenas. The brand boasts partnerships with Papa John’s, KFC, The Washington Commanders at FedExField and DC United at Audi Field.
Each retail partnership brings its own set of rules and regulations, which can be challenging, but Jones’ self-starter attitude has helped her navigate them successfully. He says: “The ability to learn is very high. “[But] one thing about not having resources, access and funding is that you just have to learn to do a lot of these things yourself. That’s what my team and I did. We received a manual from Target that was 30 pages long. We read all 30 pages until we understood the procedures completely.”
“We have our culture, our slang, our style and our food.”
Capital City Mambo Sauce began as a family business with just a husband and wife team — and some help from their four sons — which helped establish a solid foundation for the brand’s continued success, Jones said.
“I know it sounds intense, but we all feel like family,” Jones explained. “And because of that, we work in a way where we all respect each other. There are principles that we respect, and we always move forward together in cooperation and make sure that everyone’s voice is heard, everyone is considered and everyone is respected. We are treated well and that has been beneficial to us because everyone is here because they genuinely love what they do.”
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Now, Jones is looking forward to sharing Washington, DC with the world. He wants to dispel the perception that it’s just a place for politics and tourism – and use mambo sauce to draw attention to the city’s community and culture.
“If you are a person who lives here, [museums and monuments] It’s not something we think about,” said Jones. “We have our own culture, slang, style and food, which is mostly hidden because of everything else that is going on. So one thing I’m excited about is making sure that people outside of Washington, DC get to know who we are. “
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