Hitting the Road from Hickey Bottom
By Lorrie Baumann
Rebecca McCrea has spent most of the last half of this year running her Hickey Bottom Barbecue Company from the road. Starting on May 18 from her home in Butler, Pennsylvania, she’s walked more than 2,600 miles across the country to Los Angeles, California, to raise money for the Best Friends Animal Society.
Along the way, she ran Hickey Bottom Barbecue Company from roadside motel rooms and her cell phone with some help from friends back home and a sister who pitched in to pay her household bills and mow her lawn. “I have my cell phone in my hand all the time,” she said from a few days’ hike from Los Angeles. “I have people helping me out here and there who know a little bit about [the business].”
Her desire to hike cross-country started with knee surgery and a decision that, after a month of healing, she was ready to take a hike. “Back when I was a teenager, I always wanted to hike the country, and I never did it,” she said. “I’m 45 years old. If I don’t do it now, I never will. And if I’m going to do it, why not do it for a good cause?”
McCrea founded Hickey Bottom Barbecue in 2013 with three flavors of the barbecue sauce she’d been making for friends and family for years. “They said that I ought to bottle it,” she said. “It went well, so I thought, why not give it a shot? I didn’t want to dive into it just because my friends like it.” She named her new company after a quiet country road in western Pennsylvania, a place that she says reflects a way of life that includes hard work and doing your best for your family and neighbors, keeping their word and standing behind their agreements. She wants her company to reflect that also, she said.
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The Hickey Bottom Barbecue sauces are gluten free and made without high fructose corn syrup, colors or preservatives. “I’ve tried to make a better quality product for the consumer,” McCrea said. They come from a company that’s certified as a women-owned business. They’re manufactured in North Carolina and distributed in brick-and-mortar stores on the northern East Coast and nationally through Amazon, retailing at prices ranging from $2.99 to $10.
The range includes her Sweet BBQ, Honey BBQ and Hot BBQ sauces as well as a Smokey Hot Sauce and a Grillin’ Rub. The three barbecue sauces are packaged in 20-ounce PET plastic bottles, while the Grillin’ Rub comes in a 6-ounce plastic spice shaker bottle, and the Smokey Hot Sauce is packaged in a 5.25-fluid ounce glass bottle.
As for McCrea herself, she was planning to end her cross-country hike by driving back home in the chase van that had been following her along the road with water and baggage and getting back to her routine of running her business from its home base. “I miss my family and friends,” she said. “I hope to grow nationally. It’s a small company, so it takes a lot of time, but hopefully, one day it will be national – brick-and-mortar national.”
For more information, visit www.hickeybottombbq.com.
