Mikee was no different.

Mikee grew up in the family’s specialty food business. He remembers as a 10 year old child being fascinated by his father’s various attempts to create Chinese ribs. He even recalls a time when his dad offered $10,000 to a local Chinese restaurant owner for the recipe. People used to tell Mikee’s father that his ribs tasted JUST LIKE the Chinese restaurant. Mikee used to wonder, however, why he couldn’t make them the SAME as the Chinese restaurant. He never told his father this, because he didn’t want to make him feel bad. His Dad’s ribs were good, they were even excellent, but they were just not the SAME as the Chinese restaurant.

Twenty years later, Mikee owned his own prime butcher shop. He used to deliver meat to the local Chinese restaurants, and it was here that his obsession, inherited from his father, was reborn.  When he made his deliveries, he noted the surprising range of ingredients that were in the restaurant’s storerooms. Armed with a lifetime of experience in all aspects of the food industry, Mikee was able to take this information, and create his first version of a ‘real’ Chinese rib sauce. He lovingly describes this as, “Ribs from a lousy Chinese restaurant”. However, now when he went to make his deliveries, instead of just looking at the ingredients, he spoke to the restaurant owners and told them, “I know how to make Chinese ribs,” and proved it by telling them how it was done. Now that he was part of the ‘Rib Making Fraternity’, the owners of the restaurants shared their secrets with him. Mikee was then able to refine his own recipe to make the best Chinese rib sauce of them all.

Now that he had the best, what would he do with this sauce? He decided to marinate his own Chinese ribs and sell them in his butcher shop. That went so well, that he started selling chicken marinated in the sauce, and then steak. Eventually, people started coming into the shop asking for pints of the sauce,  then quarts of the sauce. When they started coming in looking for gallons, Mikee thought, “You know, maybe I need to bottle this stuff!”  Thus, MIKEE Authentic Chinese Rib Sauce was born.

Thirty six years have gone by since then. MIKEE Authentic Chinese Rib sauce has gone from being an only child, to having a full line of Chinese Sauce siblings. As time and tastes have progressed, the MIKEE family has grown.  And like any good family, it has diversified and now includes: Specialty Sauces, Teriyaki Sauces, Fisherman’s Sauces, Sugar Free Sauces, Sugar Free Salad Dressings, and Sugar Free Syrups, nearly a hundred items in all to date, there are new ones coming out all the time! MIKEE Products have won many awards over the years the most recent of which is the “best new item” for the MIKEE Sugar Free (and Gluten free) Salad Dressings. The next generation has joined MIKEE in his pursuit of sauce excellence. Luckily, they have inherited his obsessive need to make the best authentic quality products that can be put into a jar, assuring the MIKEE family will continue to thrive for generations to come.