Why do Boomers love Pace Picante Sauce?

Follow my journey down the Pace Salsa rabbit hole...

I just got back from 5 weeks in Colorado at my grandparent’s cabin and wanted to share a discovery I made early in the trip. My Dad met us there our first week and was nice enough to go grocery shopping since he beat us there. He got everything on the list, and when we sat down for lunch one of the first days I had a bit of a laugh at his expense.

He pulled out a jar of Pace Picante Sauce and some chips to go with our sandwiches and I thought to myself, what an epic Boomer moment. In this day and age, there are SO many cool local Colorado salsas we could try and compare against local Texas ones I regularly get, but my Boomer father gets PACE of all things???

I decided to vent to social media and asked the question “Why do Boomers LOVE Pace salsa? It is soooo bad!!!” and luckily I asked on both Instagram as well as GETTR/Truth Social. The answers I got sent me on a rabbit hole I did not expect to explore…

On Instagram, where most of my following is comprised of Millenials and Zoomers (Gen Z), it was 99% people agreeing with me and clowning on their Boomer parents because they are the same way with salsa. No one really seemed to know why though.

The answers, however, POURED in on GETTR and Truth Social, where the majority of my followers are Baby Boomers.

Most of the replies that weren’t attacking me for calling them Boomers (Boomers hate being called Boomers for some reason, it probably makes them feel old) led to a couple discoveries:

First, it was one of the first national brands that gave Mexican food exposure to MANY parts of the country. Immigration was at such small numbers compared to the unmitigated FLOOD we face today, things like salsa and tacos simply did not exist in many parts of the country. So first mover advantage.

Second, and more importantly, the advertising resonated with people getting exposed to the new kind of “dipping sauce”. It was EXTREMELY edgy. The “New York City” campaign spanned over at least 2 decades (80’s & 90’s) and was what most of the replies to my post referred to.

After discovering the advertising campaign which lasted YEARS through some links in my comments, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole watching DOZENS of these ads.

The main premise of all of the ads was that Pace was made in San Antonio Texas (by people who know what salsa should taste like) and that all of the other national brands were made by horrible Yankees in New York City and anyone who brought a jar of that nasty shit to dinner instead of Pace was a carpetbagger who needed to be DEALT WITH.

This salsa carpetbagger for instance, gets hog tied to a car over his unwelcome addition to supper:

This camp cook makes the same mistake and the cowboys end the commercial with “GET A ROPE” …SHEESH!

Pace went as far as insinuating that anyone using NYC salsa on a ranch was a gay horse groomer.

Overall the anti globalist, anti Yankee, anti costal elite message won over an ENTIRE generation of heartland boomers who still eat Pace regularly today, despite it being extremely mediocre stuff.

I had never seen a Pace commercial before so whatever reason they stopped making the edgy ads, whether it be political correctness, budgets, etc., meant my generation and those younger than me never had the same loyalty to Pace. We probably would have. Maybe its time to make advertising great again!

After going down this rabbit hole, I probably won’t ever give my Dad TOO much shit for eating Pace again, I get it now. (though I will probably stick to eating bougie local salsa)

Also, boomers, for the sake of EVERYONE please do not make your queso with Pace, use RO-TEL or something better for God’s sake!