SALT LAKE CITY — Sometimes if you open your eyes you will find the answer to life's concerns staring right back at you.
Consider the case of Michael Thompson.
One minute he was mixing a bottle of ketchup with a bottle of mayonnaise to make sauce his kids could dip their French fries into.
The next minute he'd answered the question of what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
"Hey Dad," said one the kids — it was either Amanda or Ben, Michael can't recall which one — "Why don't they sell fry sauce in grocery stores?"
The question lingered in Michael's mind all night.
"Yeah. Why don't they?"
This was in 1991. He was 42 at the time, divorced, helping raise his two children as a single dad and working as an engineer for Union Pacific Railroad.
After 15 years he wanted out of the railroad. "It got old, working longer hours and making less money," he recalls. He wanted to live the American dream. He wanted to be his own boss. If somebody was going to tell him to work long hours, he wanted it to be him.
To that point in his life, other than mixing up a batch at home for the kids, he'd paid no particular attention and had no particular affection for fry sauce, Utah's unique culinary contribution to the world.
Now he saw it as his ticket out.
He experimented with a number of ingredients to come up with a recipe that was tasty, unique and consistent. When he was finally satisfied he invited several friends over one night to sample the sauce — to this day a "well-guarded family secret" — and brainstorm about a company name.
The morning after the fry sauce party he saw a sheet of paper with a name lying on the table. He had no idea who came up with it, but he knew it was the name he was looking for:
"Some Dude's Fry Sauce."
Michael is the dude — the one and only dude. Other than his son and daughter, who sometimes help with the bookkeeping, Michael IS the company and has been since day one. He's the one who mixes the sauce, packages the sauce, boxes the sauce and arranges to have the sauce shipped.
It took a while for the idea to become a trend. For the first few years his marketing basically consisted of cold-calling grocery stores up and down the Wasatch Front. Michael painted houses to help make ends meet. He personally delivered every order of fry sauce in his Thompson Painting pickup truck.
The turning point came one fateful day at the headquarters of Smith's Food & Drug, when one of the chain's buyers, who happened to be a fry sauce lover and appreciated the vision of somebody mixing the ketchup, mayo, et al, so he wouldn't have to do it, decided to give the little business a big break.
He told Michael that Smith's was willing to put his bottles on its shelves.
One store led to another and another. Twenty years later, Some Dude's can be found on grocery store shelves in 12 Western states, with virtual complete saturation in Utah and Idaho, where you can find the sauce in all the major supermarket chains, plus Walmart and Costco.
In the beginning, Michael was lucky to distribute 600 bottles a month. Now he delivers 30,000 bottles month in and month out.
The one thing that hasn't changed over the years is the dude who makes it. Michael Thompson is basically doing the same thing he was doing 20 years ago in his kitchen — only in true American fashion he's taken the spark of an idea and turned it into his independence and personal freedom.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Monday and Friday. Email: benson@desnews.com.