Mark Zuckerberg and Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ Sauce

About

Mark Zuckerberg and Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ Sauce refers to an ongoing meme and inside joke about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's love for Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce. Memes about Zuckerberg's adoration for Sweet Baby Ray's originated in May 2018 when he mentioned the BBQ sauce during his smoking meats livestream video, later becoming a self-referential meme when he included it in the background of the 2021 Facebook keynote livestream when the company announced its Meta name change.

Origin

On October 9th, 2016, Mark Zuckerberg held a livestream on Facebook^[5] from his backyard where he was smoking a brisket and some ribs in a smoker behind him. The livestream video went briefly viral and was covered in the media, such as a viral video that was made out of the dialogue he said during it. This video was uploaded to YouTube^[1] by the channel TheUncannyValley on May 21st, 2018, which has edited together the samples of Zuckerberg talking about Sweet Baby Ray's, earning 1.2 million views in three years (shown below).

Spread

On October 28th, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg took part in a video conference to talk about the change in direction of Facebook's parent company to Meta, with a focus on the Metaverse. During this press conference, it was shown in the background that up on a shelf, used as a bookend, was a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce (shown below). This was quickly caught by viewers, who took to social media to express their confusion and disbelief, increasing the association and number of memes referencing Zuckerberg's love for Sweet Baby Ray's.

Later that day, Redditor^[2] dobbyisafreepup uploaded one of the first memes about it to the subreddit /r/memes^[3], earning 32,000 upvotes in five days (shown below).

On October 29th, 2021, Twitter^[4] user @bergoesbrr uploaded a meme about Zuckerberg using the After All, Why Not? Why Shouldn't I meme template to show Zuckerberg's thought process behind putting the BBQ sauce on his bookshelf (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References