A Professor Just Bottled a Truce for North Carolina's 100-Year Barbecue Sauce War

In North Carolina, few arguments run deeper than the one over barbecue sauce. On one side sits the east, where whole hogs are cooked over coals and dressed in a thin, sharp mix of vinegar, salt, and pepper. On the other sits the west, where cooks favor the pork shoulder and a sweeter, tomato-tinged sauce. It is a rivalry that families have carried for generations, argued over at cookouts and defended like a birthright. Now a wildlife professor at NC State thinks he has bottled a truce.

On August 20, the university and one of its longtime faculty members launched NC State Slobberin' Sauce, an officially licensed barbecue sauce built to do the seemingly impossible: please both halves of the state at once. It blends the west's tomato-based boldness with the east's vinegar tang into a single recipe, and every jar sold sends money back to students. It is a peace offering, a marketing play, and a scholarship fund all poured into one 16-ounce jar.

A wildlife professor with a side hustle

The man behind the bottle is Chris DePerno, a professor of fisheries, wildlife, and conservation biology who has taught wildlife management and conservation at NC State's College of Natural Resources for more than 22 years. His barbecue work is a second life that started at home, far from any lecture hall. More than 15 years ago, DePerno began making small backyard batches of sauce for family gatherings, the kind of thing you hand a neighbor in an unlabeled jar.

He kept tinkering. Over the years, cookout after cookout, DePerno refined the recipe into the sweet, smoky, tangy, and peppery blend he now sells as Dr. D's Original Barbeque Sauce. The backyard hobby grew into a real company with its own retail footprint, and the NC State partnership is its biggest stage yet. "From the very beginning, Dr. D's Original Barbeque Sauce has extended beyond making great barbeque sauce," DePerno said. "The goal has always been to give back to the communities that have supported us and to invest in the next generation."

The co-branded bottle wears its school colors openly. Slobberin' Sauce carries NC State's classic "Tuffy" wolf logo on both the label and the jar lid, and it ships in 16-ounce glass. For a university that markets its "Think and Do" ethos hard, a tenured scientist turning a family recipe into a licensed product that funds scholarships is close to a perfect mascot, one that happens to come with a screw top.

Why North Carolina needed a peace treaty

To understand why a unifying sauce is actual news, you have to understand how real the divide is. In North Carolina, barbecue means pork, full stop, and the argument is only about how you cook it and what you put on it. Barbecue historians trace the split to the Piedmont, the region west of Raleigh, where 19th-century pitmasters began cooking only the pork shoulder rather than the whole hog and vendors started stirring ketchup or tomato paste into the traditional vinegar sauce.

Lexington became the capital of that western, tomato-kissed style, home to so many pits that the town turned its name into a whole school of barbecue. The Germanic ancestry of many of the area's early cooks is often credited for the sweeter profile, closer to the sweet-and-sour flavors of German cookery, since the classic eastern sauce carried no sugar at all. West of the Piedmont, that reddish "dip" became gospel.

Eastern North Carolina never budged. There, cooks stuck with the whole hog and a peppery vinegar sauce with nothing sweet in it, a style shaped by the coastal region's easy access to vinegar and salt and defended by institutions like the century-old pits around Ayden and Goldsboro. The two camps have argued ever since, and the debate is only half joking. People in Winston-Salem still describe the state's east-versus-west sauce split as a kind of civil war, and a North Carolinian can usually tell you which side of it they were raised on. Into that standoff walks a sauce whose entire pitch is that you no longer have to choose.

Every jar funds a scholarship

The give-back is the part that separates this launch from a novelty condiment. Royalties generated through NC State's trademark licensing program, plus sales of the sauce itself, will support student scholarships, helping future Wolfpack students pay for their education. It routes money from a tailgate staple straight into tuition, which is a tidy answer to anyone who assumes licensed merchandise only pads an athletic budget.

"NC State is pleased to partner with Chris DePerno and Dr. D's Original Barbeque Sauce to bring Slobberin' Sauce to Wolfpack fans," said Chris Boyer, the university's assistant vice chancellor for strategic brand management. "This collaboration reflects our Pack's appetite for one of our state's favorite foods while creating a new opportunity to support students through scholarship funding." Translated out of press-release language: the school gets a beloved product with its logo on it, and students get a scholarship pool that grows every time somebody dresses a pork sandwich.

The timing was built for a crowd. The sauce got its featured debut during Packapalooza, NC State's enormous back-to-school street festival that closes down Hillsborough Street and draws tens of thousands of people to campus every August. Billed as one of the largest single-day festivals in the region, it is exactly the kind of hometown crowd a unity sauce is made for. Slobberin' Sauce is now available on the Slobberin' Sauce website and through Dr. D's established retail and direct-to-consumer channels, so a fan in Asheville and a fan in Wilmington can order the same bottle and, at least in theory, finally agree on something.

Can one bottle end the fight

Whether a single sauce can end a fight North Carolinians have enjoyed having for more than a century is another question entirely, and probably beside the point. Purists on both coasts of the state will keep their own jars and their own opinions, and a blended sauce is unlikely to convert a whole-hog loyalist from Ayden or a dip devotee from Lexington. Part of the fun of the divide is that nobody wants it settled.

But that is what makes Slobberin' Sauce a smart piece of barbecue diplomacy rather than a lecture. It does not tell anyone their side is wrong. It puts both flavors in one jar, wraps it in a logo half the state already cheers for, and sends the proceeds to a kid's education. For DePerno, the whole thing lines up with the same "Think and Do" motto he has spent two decades teaching under: take an idea from the backyard, refine it with a scientist's patience, and turn it into something that outlives the cookout. As he put it, the point was always to invest in the next generation, one bottle at a time.

Sources

NC State News, "NC State and Faculty Member Launch Officially Licensed Barbeque Sauce" (Aug. 2026). CBS 17, "NC State and professor launch Slobberin' Sauce promising to bridge the state barbecue sauce divide". Slobberin' Sauce, Dr. D's Original Barbeque Sauce. Our State magazine, "Why Are There Two Styles of NC Barbecue?". NC State College of Natural Resources faculty directory. Packapalooza. Images: courtesy NC State University and Dr. D's Original Barbeque Sauce.