‘Queer Eye’ Sends Jones Bar-B-Q Sauce Sales Through the Roof

On the latest season of Netflix’s hit series Queer Eye, meat-smoking sisters Mary and Deborah Jones get a makeover along with their Kansas City restaurant Jones Bar-B-Q — and now fans are clamoring to get a taste of the duo’s signature barbecue sauce.

As the sisters explain in their Queer Eye episode, the sauce is baed on a secret recipe passed down to them by their father, Leavy, who also worked as a pitmaster when Deborah and Mary were growing up. A few years ago, the sisters started selling their sauce to customers who asked for it, but they stopped because the demand got “out of control” and they couldn’t keep up with production. In their episode, culture guru Karamo Brown surprises Mary and Deborah by taking them to Original Juan Specialty Foods — a packaged foods company — where they work alongside food expert Antoni Porowski on the bottled version of their sauce. At the end of the episode, when the sisters are showing off their refurbished restaurant, they proudly present the bottled sauce to their family and friends.

Apparently, a lot of Queer Eye fans wanted to buy the sauce over the weekend, because there was a temporary shortage due to high demand. Now it appears that the sauce is back in stock, but the Jones Bar-B-Q homepage includes a special note for potential buyers: “Please bear with us in receiving your order. The response to our story and sauce has been overwhelming. Please allow a 7 - 10 day delay in shipping times. We are doing our best to keep up. We appreciate your order!” The tiny restaurant also drew long lines over the weekend.

Christopher Smith/Netflix

While many viewers are learning about Jones Bar-B-Q for the first time, the restaurant already had a great reputation and legions of fans before the Queer Eye crew paid a visit. The sisters have been working in the local barbecue scene for over three decades. Deborah says that they have “at least a couple hundred” regulars that they know by name. Fans of the restaurant have been known to stop by as early as 7 a.m. to get a first taste of the meat fresh from the smoker, and the sisters usually sell out of everything by noon. When asked about the experience of being on Queer Eye, Mary told local new station KSHB: “It changed my life tremendously. I’ll never be the same again.”

The Jones sisters’ sauce is now available for purchase on their website, and all eight episodes of this particularly emotional season of Queer Eye are now streaming on Netflix.

• Jones Bar-B-Q [Official]
• The Jones Sisters Got The Queer Eye Glow Up This Weekend & Sold Out Of Their Famous BBQ Sauce [Refinery 29]
• True pitmasters: The Jones sisters [KC.com]
• Jones sisters of Jones BBQ featured on Netflix’s ‘Queer Eye’ [KSHB]
• Pitmaster sisters smoking out the competition in Kansas City’s barbecue scene [CBS]