Duke’s Mayonnaise has been a Southern pantry staple for more than a century

White bread and juicy summer tomatoes never had a better friend than Duke’s Mayonnaise. A cornerstone of Southern pantries, the condiment was crafted in 1917 by Eugenia Duke, who spread it on homemade sandwiches she fed to recruits at Camp Sevier, a World War I training ground outside Greenville, South Carolina. Word traveled, production scaled up, and the entrepreneur began jarring her creation at an old carriage factory, still standing today as Wyche Pavilion, a popular events venue. Over a century later, the flagship formula remains untouched: egg yolks (no whites), oil, salt, and a splash of apple cider vinegar for its unmistakably bright, “twangy” flavor.

• The company produces around 365,000 jars of mayo a day using roughly 70,000 pounds of egg yolks.
• Twenty Greenville restaurants along the Duke’s Mayo Trail include Duke’s in special menu items—mixed into the smoked fish dip at the Jones Oyster Co., slathered on the Dirty Rotten Scoundrel Burger at French restaurant Scoundrel, or drizzled over beef carpaccio at Fork and Plough.
• Duke’s also sells a line of Southern sauces with ties across the region, such as Mississippi Comeback Sauce (a spicy remoulade originating in Jackson) and an assemblage of barbecue sauces, from Carolina Gold and Alabama White to Tennessee Smoke & Whiskey.
• Trek through Greenville’s picturesque Falls Park for historical stops associated with the brand. Eugenia Duke Bridge extends over the Reedy River and offers a primer on its namesake, while Wyche Pavilion, the original manufacturing plant, punctuates the landscape only minutes away.
• Say hi to the brand’s mascot, a bushy-browed mayo jar named Tubby, at the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, an annual postseason college football game in Charlotte, North Carolina. In place of a Gatorade shower, the winning team’s coach gets doused in a bucketful of mayo.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of Southbound.

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