The following is an extended version of the article that appears in our July 2024 issue.
West Virginia University football coach Neal Brown is doused in mayonnaise during the 2023 Duke’s Mayo Bowl.
Without mayonnaise, Southern food simply wouldn’t be the same. Where would we be without pimento cheese and potato salad? Coleslaw? Deviled eggs? Tomato sandwiches?
For many Southerners, there’s only one option: Duke’s. Under that yellow lid lies a thick, tangy spread that effortlessly adds dimension to everything from a BLT to a chocolate mayonnaise cake.
Duke’s fandom has been with us for a while. At its headquarters on West Broad Street with the iconic incandescent sign, Duke’s owner C.F. Sauer Co. has fielded innumerable recipes and letters, paintings and concepts for TV commercials in celebration of its beloved spread over the years.
There’s the tale of the mother of the bride who requested four glass Duke’s jars to use as centerpieces for her daughter’s wedding (Duke’s switched from glass to plastic containers around 2005). There was a man who requested a tomato sandwich made with Duke’s on his deathbed. And there was a woman in North Carolina who requested three glass jars for her cremains.
But the love of Duke’s has been supercharged in recent years, thanks to efforts by a new Richmond-based creative team to embrace the homegrown mayonnaise love.
In 2020, an annual college football bowl game in Charlotte, North Carolina, was renamed the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, in which winning coaches are doused in 5 gallons of mayonnaise. The brand’s annual Hot Tomato Summer campaign celebrates local restaurants and hands out LED signs in the shape of Duke’s mayo jars. Through a partnership with Richmond’s Yellow Bird Tattoo, Duke’s has paid for more than 150 people to get tattoos of the brand.
Then there’s Tubby, the Gritty-esque mascot with googly eyes and Eugene Levy caterpillar eyebrows. Said to personify the “twang” of Duke’s, Tubby aims to bring his own brand of “mayohem” everywhere he goes.
While corporate juggernaut Hellmann’s remains the king of mayo mountain, Duke’s is looking to cover the spread and smear the competition.
Long-lasting Loyalty
Hardcore fans of Apple wait in line for hours to get the latest iPhone. Diet Coke devotees would rather go thirsty than order a Pepsi at a restaurant. On the back windows of many a Chevy pickup truck, you can find a sticker of Calvin, the 6-year-old of comic strip fame, relieving himself onto a Ford logo.
But Bob Kelley says he’s never seen such a fierce display of brand loyalty as the day his MBA students gave presentations on mayonnaise.
The division was largely geographical, with Southern students repping Duke’s and Northerners preferring Hellmann’s. One young woman voiced her love of Miracle Whip, a condiment that was launched as a cheaper alternative to mayonnaise during the Great Depression. “I thought war was going to break out,” says Kelley, an assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Business who has also taught at the VCU Brandcenter. “I thought they were going to boo her out of the room. She stood up and started yelling. It was unbelievable, the passion towards mayonnaise.”
Devotion to Duke’s began in 1917 after America entered the first World War. An enterprising local woman named Eugenia Duke began selling sandwiches at Army canteens and other eateries around Greenville, South Carolina, to contribute to her family’s income. After the war, she began bottling her now-famous spread for sale.
Then, as today, the recipe used egg yolks, oil and cider vinegar, the latter of which gives Duke’s its signature twang. Unlike others — including Hellmann’s — Duke’s doesn’t add sugar, which was rationed during wartime and left out of the recipe.
Struggling to keep up with the demand for her namesake mayonnaise, Duke sold the business to Sauer in 1929. For decades, Sauer expanded its footprint throughout the Southeast. In 2019, private equity fund Falfurrias Capital Partners acquired Sauer and the Duke’s brand.
Since then, a new creative team has become responsible for spreading the love.
Duke’s has paid for fans to get tattoos like these.
Richmond DNA
It was the kind of viral moment that a social marketing manager dreams of.
While dancing to celebrate winning the first Duke’s Mayo Bowl in December 2020, the University of Wisconsin Badgers quarterback Graham Mertz dropped the trophy, shattering the football-shaped piece of Lenox crystal on top. Mertz had a solution: He taped a squeeze bottle of Duke’s to the base and posted an image to his Instagram.
As ubiquitous as Duke’s may be in the South, the brand was still relatively unknown to much of the country. With the shattering of a crystal football, that began to change. Like many consumer packaged goods, Duke’s saw a surge in sales in early 2020 when the pandemic led people to stock their pantries. That June, Falfurrias hired Rebecca Lupesco as “Duke’s brand manager of ‘mayohem’” and Digital Content Manager Sarah DiPeppe to further the brand’s good fortune.
“The dream for a marketer is when there’s this passion that already exists,” Lupesco says. “We’re not creating this; we’re really just fueling the fire.”
Before Lupesco came on board, the brand’s tagline was “The Secret to Great Food.” In 2020, Sauer’s then-creative agency, The Richards Group in Texas, came up with “It’s Got Twang.” Lupesco says the previous slogan “was not differentiating to the brand, whereas ‘twang’ was really taking the tanginess of the mayo, combined with our Southern roots and our heritage and personality, and bringing it to life.”
Following controversy around The Richards Group, Sauer moved its creative business to Richmond ad agency Familiar Creatures, which focuses on challenger brands, those that have outsized ambitions in industries in which they’re not the market leader. While Duke’s is the third best-selling mayonnaise brand in America, Hellmann’s and Best Foods, both owned by Unilever, take up 98% of the market share.
“Challenger brands usually have to show up in new and innovative ways to attack the market leaders, and that’s what we’ve been doing with Duke’s since day one,” says Dustin Artz, who co-founded Familiar Creatures with Justin Bajan in 2018. The two met while working at The Martin Agency, headquartered in Richmond.
Artz credits Lupesco and DiPeppe with much of the brand’s recent success.
“They’re taking a brand that is thought of as cool and nostalgic and not ruining it with a corporate sensibility,” Artz says. “That Duke’s fans are unapologetically fanatics over a mayonnaise is kind of absurd, and we lean into that.”
Where the brand previously marketed itself to older Southern women, it’s now going after younger consumers who are already intensely loyal.
“The shift has been to millennials — Southern-minded millennials, we call them. Tastemakers who are up on new things, good food, tattoos, chef culture, etc.,” Artz says. “We are leaning into that. It’s not like we’re Betty Crocker and now we’re trying to be young and hip. It has fundamental DNA in the brand.”
Another big part of the brand’s DNA is Richmond itself. Not only are Sauer and Familiar Creatures based here, but so is Golden Word, Duke’s PR firm. Lupesco, who met Artz and Bajan at The Martin Agency, says the talent pool and culture of Richmond have created an ideal scenario for Duke’s recent marketing push.
“There’s a deeper partnership that can happen when we all share the same city and know the same folks,” Lupesco says. “It’s just a testament to the creative talent that Richmond has.”
Embracing Culture
Their strategy has involved embracing Richmond’s culture of tattoos and dining. As Richmond has been ranked as the third-most tattooed city in America — and as chefs are one of the most tattooed professions — paying for Richmonders to get Duke’s tattoos just made sense. Over the course of two tattoo giveaways, Duke’s has footed the bill for more than 150 people to get Duke’s tattoos at Yellow Bird Tattoo.
In the summer of 2021, Duke’s launched its first week-long Hot Tomato Summer promotion to celebrate local restaurants and get people to frequent struggling restaurants during the pandemic. The promotion encourages restaurants to feature specials that star fresh tomatoes and Duke’s Mayonnaise.
“We wanted to do something where we could help restaurants get more foot traffic,” Lupesco says. “We focused on Richmond mainly because we were here.”
The fourth annual Hot Tomato Summer takes place this month from July 18-28, adding Raleigh, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee, to the other four markets already included in the promotion. Lupesco hopes at least 300 restaurants will take part in Hot Tomato Summer this year.
The yellow, neon-style LED signs in the shape of Duke’s jars were created as a way to recognize participants of the first Hot Tomato Summer. Those signs are now one of many expanded merch offerings sold on its website.
“It’s like a Bat-Signal,” DiPeppe says about seeing them around Richmond. “We want them everywhere.”
The brand has also embraced Richmond by hiring local artists and makers to craft items including Duke’s jar earrings and custom-made pants featuring Duke’s by Silly Cowgirl. Stephanie Ganz, a local food writer and Richmond magazine contributor, develops recipes for Duke’s, while local theater professor, director and performer Tawyna “Dr. T” Pettiford-Wates provides the brand’s online voice.
“We really want to give back to the community that reps us so hard,” DiPeppe says. “I run our influencer campaign, so it’s really up to me to garner and fan the flames of those relationships.”
Lupesco says DiPeppe is “definitely the best social manager I’ve ever come across. The work that she has done with our social channel and social presence is one of the biggest things that has happened for the brand in the past four years.”
Duke’s Mayo mascot Tubby
Making a Mascot
A crowd of anthropomorphic vegetables boos the wrestler in the ring. A tomato is thrown at Big Mayo, a jar of mayonnaise with a blue lid who’s flexing his muscles at the crowd. A jar of Duke’s enters the ring, and the crowd cheers. Before long, the jar of Duke’s has dispatched Big Mayo with moves like “The Jar Opener,” “The Bread Spreader” and “The BLTKO.”
Channeling “Celebrity Deathmatch,” this stop-motion-style ad that aired during the 2022 Duke’s Mayo Bowl portrays what the brand would like to do to the competition.
After Duke’s got its football game contract, the company knew it needed to create a mascot to appear on the sidelines. As Artz and Bajan of Familiar Creatures had previously worked on the GEICO Gecko, the Travelocity Gnome and Flo from Progressive, Familiar Creatures ideated the mascot’s look and feel. The result was Tubby, a mischievous mascot who looks like a jar of mayonnaise and Gritty, the fuzzy orange mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers, had a love child.
“We really wanted to bring to life the boldness of the brand,” Artz says of Tubby. Other possible mascot incarnations included a deviled egg and a lid.
Once they nailed down the concept, Familiar Creatures contacted Jennifer Q. Smith, the “Queen of Fuzz” at mascot company Avant Garb, to create the sentient jar of mayo. Tubby’s name was crowdsourced: Other top contenders included Jarface and Fred the Spread.
“He’s not supposed to be this cutesy child character,” DiPeppe explains. “He’s a little nutty, and that’s what we like about him.”
The king of mayo mountain is starting to take notice. If Duke’s works with an influencer or brand partner, they often get approached right after by Hellmann’s for a collaboration, Lupesco says. After Duke’s sponsored the bowl game, Hellmann’s tried to get some football sponsorships of its own. Hellmann’s did not respond to a request for comment.
“Duke’s is growing really fast, especially among millennials, and they don’t like it,” Artz says of Hellmann’s, adding that Duke’s will launch a new campaign later this summer to help introduce itself to new customers.
Whatever condiment warfare may be playing out on the nation’s screens and supermarket shelves, for DiPeppe there’s no contest.
“It’s richer. It’s creamier,” DiPeppe says. “It’s what you want mayonnaise to taste like.”
