By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University
“I’ll take my sandwich with everything on it.”
That’s a phrase I would often use when ordering lunch. While that means including all the possible condiments on my sandwich, today we’ll meet a family that is producing a food product that is actually named Everything Sauce.
This family experienced great tragedy, but as a result they are expanding their culinary entrepreneurship.
Denee and Jess Cupp are the owners of MKC’s Kitchen, LLC in Ness County. We have previously featured the Cupps and their various enterprises, including a café in their town of Bazine. The Cupps had two children, a son age 2 and a daughter age 4, at the time they moved to Kansas.
Son Jay Cupp is now a private pilot and working on becoming a corporate pilot.
Daughter Makenzee was known to most people as Kenz or Kenzee. She worked with her dad in the café kitchen while Denee and Jay worked in the front. Kenzee loved to cook. She especially enjoyed making sauce and spicy rubs with her father.
“She comes from a whole family of amazing chefs,” Denee Cupp said.
Their special sauce came from an old family recipe. Kenzee loved making it from scratch using tomatoes from their own farm. Kenzee frequently would win purple ribbons with her cooking projects at the 4-H fair.
As a teenager, Kenzee baked chocolate chip cookies and pies to sell at school, and they would always sell out. She used the proceeds to help pay for her many FFA trips. She became president of the Ness City High School FFA chapter and secretary for the southwest Kansas district.
Her dream was to go to culinary school, own a food truck, and become a farm-to-table chef. After high school, she went to culinary school at Hays and was at the top of her class.
Then came March 1, 2021.
Nineteen-year-old Makenzee was driving home from Hays when an inattentive driver barreled through an intersection, plowed into her car, and ended her life. It was an unspeakable tragedy.
Ultimately, the Cupp family decided to honor her culinary legacy.
“Through God’s grace, we attempt daily to repurpose our pain into passion,” the Cupps said on their website. Using the initials of her full name – Makenzee Kathleen Cupp – they named their business MKC’s Kitchen, LLC.
“We purchased the food truck as Kenzee had planned to do and we use it to serve amazing food, as inspired by Kenz,” Cupp said. They operate a commercial kitchen and small processing plant. The food truck goes to various venues to provide meals.
The Cupps also prepare healthy snacks for a local children’s Bible study group called Jesus and Me. The snacks are primarily made from scratch using locally sourced food. “It’s fun to watch these kids try out different foods,” Cupp said.
Today, MKC Kitchen’s signature products are their homemade rub and special sauce. The MKC’s Rub is described as “sweet with a touch of heat.” The sauce is made from the old family recipe. It is so flavorful and versatile that it is called Kenzee’s Everything Sauce.
“We’ve used Everything Sauce on things like smoked cream cheese, pizza and baked beans, and it takes the flavor to a whole new level,” Cupp said. The sauce and rub are for sale online and have been shipped as far away as California and Florida.
These products are also available through local retail stores in the region, including stores in larger cities such as Salina and Hays, plus outlets in rural communities such as Ness City, La Crosse and Rush Center, population 141 people. Now, that’s rural.
“I just want to feed people and tell people where their food comes from,” Cupp said.
For more information, see www.mkckitchen.com.
I’ll take my sandwich with everything – no, not just tomatoes and onions, but with Everything Sauce. We commend Denee and Jess Cupp for making a difference by honoring Kenzee’s memory with culinary entrepreneurship.
To them, it means everything.
And there’s more. The Cupp family has found another way to honor Kenzee’s legacy. We’ll learn about that next week.
Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at https://www.huckboydinstitute.org/kansas-profiles. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit http://www.huckboydinstitute.org.
