Mary Rivera displays James & Edna Mae’s Everything Sauce on Friday, Sept. 24, 2021, outside of Woodman’s grocery store, where it is being sold. (Photo by Kevin Haas/Rock River Current)
By Chelsea Meyer
Rock River Current

ROCKFORD — As a young girl, Mary Rivera would sit at the kitchen table with her mom and cheer on her dad as he made his special family recipe sauce.

Today that sauce, now bottled and sold at Woodman’s grocery store, is drawing cheers from families across the city as it sells out faster than Rivera can keep it stocked.

The Rockford entrepreneur’s path to success in stores involved a search for a missing lottery ticket and a pair of dreams that encouraged her to make her business a reality, she said Wednesday in an interview on B103, a partner with the Rock River Current.

Rivera, who has a close bond with her parents, said before her dad’s death he tasked her to find his missing lottery ticket.

“Take care of the rest of the family,” he told her. “I know you will.”

More news: How a moment of inspiration become one of Rockford’s biggest burgers

The charge he gave her stuck with her for years.

“After my dad passed I looked all over for the lottery ticket and never found it,” Rivera said. “Many years later, I had a dream about my father.”

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Mary Rivera displays James & Edna Mae’s Everything Sauce on Friday, Sept. 24, 2021, inside of Woodman’s grocery store, where it is being sold. (Photo by Kevin Haas/Rock River Current)

In that dream, she sat at that same kitchen table with her parents as her mom shouted out the ingredients and her dad stirred the special sauce.

“The dream was so good I did not want to wake up because I was with my parents and we were having a ball together,” she said.

The next day, her daughter Tiffany Rivera called her and asked if she wanted to participate in a fair using her parents’ sauce.

The sauce impressed people at the fair at Booker Washington Center, and months later, Rivera had another dream.

“I had a dream that I owned this huge factory, and we were running the barbecue sauce,” she said.

Ever since she has been making James & Edna Mae’s Everything Sauce and selling it at fairs all over.

“We were riding from a fair and I said, ‘I found my dad’s lottery ticket. It’s the barbecue sauce!'”

A photo of both her parents is displayed on the front of the bottle, representing where the sauce began.

James & Edna Mae’s Everything Sauce sold out within two days at Woodman’s on Perryville Road in Rockford. She’s working to bring more options to grocery shelves.

Right now, it’s just the spicy sauce, but in October you can look for original on the shelves.

James & Edna Mae’s Everything Sauce. (Photo by Kevin Haas/Rock River Current)
Mary Rivera, center, displays James & Edna Mae’s Everything Sauce along with her daughter, Tiffany Rivera and boyfriend Nate Guin on Friday, Sept. 24, 2021, at Woodman’s grocery store, where the sauce is being sold. (Photo by Kevin Haas/Rock River Current)

This article is by Chelsea Meyer. Email her at chelsea@b103fm.com

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