for hours over an open flame, Mid’s sauces develop a rich, concentrated flavor.  (Many commercially made sauces are steamed in a closed container to shorten cooking time, which dilutes the flavors.)  Mid’s also uses high quality ingredients, like peppers and onions cut in a large, 3/4-inch dice and whole sliced mushrooms, which give the sauces a rich texture and flavor. 

     Ground meat and Italian sausage come in fresh daily and are used within 48 hours of delivery. Each quart jar of Mid’s Meat Sauce, Meat and Mushroom Sauce, Italian Sausage Sauce, and Italian Sausage with Peppers Sauce contains a very generous 12 ounces of meat or sausage. There are almost no unpronounceable additives in Mid’s sauces, just tomatoes, tomato paste, vegetables, meat, olive oil, herbs and spices, things you’d want and expect to be in your pasta sauce.  “We want to keep the homemade flavor, “ Ricketts explained when I spoke with him.  “Our sauce is made just the way you’d make it at home.”

     In addition to the pizza sauce and the meat and Italian sausage sauces, Mid’s makes Meatless Sauce; Tomato, Basil, and Mushroom Sauce; Extra Thick and Chunky Sauce; and Arrabiatta Delicato Sauce, a mildly spicy, zesty sauce that includes red, green, and banana peppers.  Their bestsellers are the Meatless Sauce and Meat Sauce, with the Italian Sausage Sauce coming in third but gaining fast.  Ricketts said his personal favorite is the

    In a large, spotless, white-walled room filled with equally spotless stainless steel equipment, I climbed a few steps up to a small platform overlooking an enormous stainless steel kettle of deep red, bubbling sauce.  Puffs of fragrant steam rose from the sauce and I inhaled the deep, savory aroma of tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, spices . . . in short, pizza sauce, in my opinion, some of the best pizza sauce around.  I was at the home of Mid’s Pasta Sauce in Navarre.

    The modern, well equipped plant seems a far cry from the small Navarre restaurant where Mideo Octavio, an immigrant from Sicily, first began making sauce from his family’s recipe in 1939.  The sauce became so popular that Mideo, nicknamed Mid, began selling the sauce to customers in the 1950’s and opened a small plant, where Mid’s sauce continued to be hand made from the family recipe.  In many ways, however, the Mid’s sauces of today are not so far from the original Mid’s as one might think.

    Mid’s Pasta Sauce, owned by Scott Ricketts, president and CEO, and his partner, Steve Cress, since 1997, still follows Mideo Octavio’s standards for sauce making.  Simmered slowly

Arrabiatta Delicato, although, he admitted, “Actually I like them all.  Every time I taste one, I think ‘this is really good sauce.”

    The buying public seems to agree with Ricketts.  When he and Cress bought Mid’s 11 years ago, their sauces were sold in 80 stores in 5 counties.  Now Mid’s sauces are sold in more than 3,000 stores in 17 states.  A new plant was built on the original site in 2006 to accommodate the continuing growth in sales. 

    In development now at Mid’s are a cheese sauce and  a Mid’s salsa.  Both are being carefully tested, one batch at a time, to meet the high standards of good taste for which Mid’s is known and loved by its customers. You can find  Mid’s sauces at most grocery stores in the Canton-Akron-Cleveland area, and Mid’s sauces are sold online at www.soupbase.com. 

    For more information about Mid’s (including the ingredient panels for all the sauces), go to the Mid’s web site, www.mids.cc.