His Company Produced Trump’s Inauguration and Drive-In Concerts for Hundreds of Thousands — Kinzie Foods’ Origin Story

Walter Kinzie bought his first livestock at age seven. By the time most people are picking a college major, he was already building a career producing live events — a career that eventually led his company, Encore Live, to produce nine of the eleven official events at Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

Then COVID hit and shut down every venue he had. Instead of waiting it out, he launched the Encore Drive-In Nights series, putting on shows with Garth Brooks and Metallica that drew hundreds of thousands of fans to outdoor theaters across North America, safely distanced in their cars.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, his aunt’s barbecue sauce recipe — the one he’d been mason-jarring and giving away as gifts for years — started generating so many refill requests that it became exhausting and expensive to keep up for free. He told his wife he was over it. Her response: he wasn’t going to tell people to get lost, so he might as well just start charging and let the price do it for him. He priced it at $20 a jar, fully expecting that to kill demand. Orders spiked instead. He doubled the minimum to scare people off. Orders spiked again.

Realizing he might actually be onto something, he did his homework — and found out a friend-of-a-friend had just sold his salsa company for $146 million, and TRUFF, a hot sauce brand, had just raised a $180 million round. No investors, no big launch, just mason jars and a recipe worth stealing shelf space for. That sauce has since won first place at the largest barbecue sauce competition in the world and now sits in more than 70 stores.

What gets me about Walter’s story isn’t any single number — it’s that none of these things (concerts, inaugurations, a sauce brand) were the plan. They were what happened when someone kept saying yes to the next opportunity in front of them instead of waiting for the “right” one.

Walter walks through all of it — the pivot, the fire-hose year of COVID, and how a family recipe turned into a real CPG brand — on this episode of Starting Small.

Listen to the full conversation with Walter Kinzie on Apple Podcasts