BBQ Sauce Sodium Database: 2026 Label-Verified Reference

What the data says, in one paragraph

The typical commercial BBQ sauce carries 280 mg of sodium per stated serving — roughly 12% of the American Heart Association's 2,300 mg daily upper limit. The leanest sauces in our catalog ship at 0 mg per serving; the saltiest tops out at 2640 mg, which is 115% of the daily limit from a single 2-tablespoon dollop. That's a 500×+ spread inside a single condiment category, almost entirely driven by which regional style and what base ingredients the brand chose. Pick a different bottle, eat a meaningfully different amount of salt.

Methodology

Sodium values are taken directly from the printed Nutrition Facts label on the bottle as it appeared on the date shown. We accept three label sources: manufacturer site, retailer product page, and Open Food Facts (a consumer-contributed third-party label database). Each sauce's detail page links the specific source we captured, so the reader can audit any datum.

A sauce enters this dataset when it has a published sodium number AND clears our standard publication gate (ingredient line confirmed against a source, nutrition not entirely missing). Sauces tagged as duplicates, bundles/variety packs, or not-yet-approved are excluded. Serving size is reproduced as printed; we do not normalise to a common reference because the FDA-defined RACC for BBQ sauce is 2 tablespoons and almost every label complies, so cross-sauce comparison is generally honest.

Bands match the FDA sodium-claim thresholds: a product can be labelled sodium free at <5 mg per serving, very low sodium at <35 mg, low sodium at <140 mg. Above 140 mg there is no formal claim ladder; we use 240 mg (10% of the AHA daily limit) and 480 mg (20%) to split the upper range.

Formulations change. The "last updated" date at the top of this page is the most recent capture across the catalog. Individual sauces are recaptured on a rolling basis. If you want to verify a specific value, click through to the sauce detail page — the source URL and capture date are linked.

How to cite this database

Free to cite, quote, and link without permission. We ask that you link back to this page when reusing the statistics so readers can verify the underlying data.

Working on a story and want a custom cut of the data (e.g. sodium against sugar, by-state-of-origin, time-series for a specific brand)? We can usually answer within a day — see the contact information on the imprint page.