Our guest today is Ryan Mitchell, son of BBQ hall-of-famer Ed Mitchell from Wilson, North Carolina. Ryan serves as the business-savvy brain behind his father’s brand. At a very young age, Ryan began working in the Mitchell family restaurant. Although BBQ was the only way of life he knew, Ryan pictured a different path for this career: After high school, Ryan charted his own course and attended East Carolina University to pursue his dreams of playing college football and earning a degree in Economics. He spent eight years working in commercial and investment banking for some of the nation’s largest firms before he re-evaluated his professional life. After going through a major market crash and brutal lay-offs, Ryan felt it was time to leave his sixty-hour-a-week desk job, return to his roots and pursue his passion. After coming home to Wilson, Ryan had to rush his father, Ed Mitchell, to the hospital after experiencing a diabetes health scare. Shortly after Ed recovered, the father-and-son duo worked together to develop a line of barbecue sauces with zero sugar, using natural sugars from fruit and vegetables, just as the Mitchell matriarch, Doretha Mitchell, made from their childhood. Today, True Made Foods sauces are available in over 6,000 stores. The story of the Mitchell family over four generations will be shared in their first cookbook, Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque in June 2023 published by HarperCollins.