It’s 15 minutes until kickoff, and you’re still trying to grill burgers for a dozen people you invited over to watch the game. You’re in a hurry and, well, you’ve never been a great cook. Fortunately, you have Bacon Salt.

The savory salt comes in a seasoning jar just like regular table salt, but the flavor performs above and beyond generic Safeway salt. It is, as the name suggest, bacon-flavored salt.

“You can make anything you want taste like real delicious bacon instantly,” said Justin Esch, co-inventor of Bacon Salt. “This is the perfect food for college kids.”

Esch recommends using Bacon Salt as a seasoning for grilled meats, potatoes, fish, soups, salads and pastas. The opportunities, however, are endless. Any food you have ever desired to taste like bacon can taste like bacon within seconds.

For those concerned about its meat byproducts, Bacon Salt has no animal products and is completely kosher.

“You don’t need to do a whole lot to make food taste good,” said Dave Lefkow, co-inventor of Bacon Salt.

The Bacon Salt business got underway this past January, when Esch and Lefkow were sitting around wishing they could make foods taste like bacon.

“In our proposal, we said we want three flavors: original, hickory and maple; we want it to taste like bacon frying on a Sunday night,” Lefkow said.

The end product of their brainstorming was Bacon Salt. Esch and Lefkow set up shop in Lefkow’s garage and launched a Web site in July. They spent nothing on advertising, but by the end of the first week they were scrambling to complete 800 orders.

The anomaly between these figures is explained through Facebook. All Esch had to do was create a Bacon Salt Facebook group.

“We sent out emails to 200 friends and family asking people to join the Facebook profile, and we searched for people who had key words ‘bacon’,” Esch said. “I joined every bacon group on Facebook. What [Facebook users] did was repost it on the Web. All of the sudden it just mushroomed.”

Soon after their Web site launched, Esch and Lefkow discovered blog posts about Bacon Salt, and college students around the nation were spreading the word about Bacon Salt on forums. A particularly rabid fan started proselytizing Bacon Salt at DePaul University in Chicago by starting another Bacon Salt group on Facebook.

“My friend introduced me to it and then I saw their Web site,” said Angelo Pinto, the creator of the Bacon Salt Facebook group at DePaul. “[Esch and Lefkow] were talking about how they were trying to up their distribution and become well known, and I thought ‘I like it, and I might as well start a Bacon Salt group.’ I was just trying to get the word out about it.”

With help from college students like Pinto, Esch and Lefkow’s business grew so much that they subsequently quit their day jobs to sell Bacon Salt full time.

“We thought it would take months to really catch fire, and the internet got hold of it and we were just like overwhelmed with orders,” Lefkow said. “We had to jump on this as quickly as possible because you don’t get opportunities like this a lot in life.”

Since their first sale in July, they have sold more than 18,000 jars of Bacon Salt through their Web site, restaurants and local grocers. They have landed interviews on ABC Radio, NPR and recently appeared on local news station KOMO. Their office moved from Lefkow’s garage to a warehouse in Seattle and employed three other people, one of them a UW student.

“They offered me a sample when I went in for the interview and that’s how I knew I wanted to work there, because I was blown away by it,” junior Tori Wadzita said. “I’ve been working there for three weeks now. I live with nine other people and we’ve gone through so many bottles of it because we use it on everything.”

Esch and Lefkow had no idea their product would be such a success. In their opinion, their product was delicious, but they were never expecting business to take off so quickly.

“The worst case scenario was we make something and just use it for ourselves,” Lefkow said. “We made something we like.”

Indeed, Esch empties a small amount of Bacon Salt into his hand and samples at various intervals while sitting in the U-Village Starbucks.

“I’m definitely addicted to my own product,” Esch said.

Bacon Salt started from a modest budget of $5,000 donated in full by Lefkow’s 3-year-old son. His son was playing baseball in the backyard and tried hitting the ball left-handed like his favorite baseball player, Ichiro. Lefkow ended up getting hit in the face by the ball while his wife caught the whole thing on video.

“My wife encouraged me to send it into America’s Funniest Home videos and we had $5,000 two weeks later,” Lefkow said.

Esch and Lefkow had plenty of help and encouragement in starting their fledgling business.

“Dave Lefkow has been a customer of City Fish for years, and I know how hard it is to try to launch a company,” said Jon Daniels, owner of City Fish in Seattle. “They called me up and I told them I would gladly help them launch. Sales are still going good. There are still people coming down looking for it.”

Both Esch and Lefkow were surprised to find themselves in the food industry.

“We were tech guys; we never thought we’d be in the food industry,” Lefkow said. “Suddenly we have a business relationship with a guy who I have a relationship with for no other reason than I love his fish.”

They also had to consider the risk that was involved with leaving their sturdy careers to pursue a bacon flavored dream.

“Try graduating, going to college, then working as hard as you can for four years, and then going to your family and saying ‘We’re selling Bacon-flavored seasoning.’ … It’s a big step,” Esch said. “It wouldn’t have been able to happen if there wouldn’t have been a lot of support.”

Their success, however, has not gone to their heads.

“We’re just a couple of young entrepreneurs trying to make everything like bacon,” Lefkow said.

[Reach reporter Andrew Doughman at features@thedaily.washington.edu]