How to Start a Hot Sauce Business

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How to Start a Hot Sauce Business

• Test, test, test. Work on your recipe, refine it, change it, experiment with it. Take your time and really develop it. As Miracle Max said in The Princess Bride, “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.” Once you’re convinced that you’ve got a few great versions, invite friends whose palates you trust to come over for a tasting and some honest feedback. Perhaps you decide to serve three different styles of a sauce you love — one’s hotter, one has more curry, one has more ingredients. Set them out in bowls to test, and within each of those three categories, offer two or three versions (maybe one has a teaspoon of cinnamon, or mustard, while another doesn’t). Ask people to comment honestly; ask which sauce they’d buy for $5. Keep a careful log of comments and a record of what ingredient proportions went into each sample. Keep repeating these tastings, throwing out the versions no one likes, and asking strangers to taste them as well, until you hone in on a recipe that you and others think you can’t live without.

• As you develop recipes, think about cost. I once came up with an awesome recipe for ginger-fig chutney, which I still adore; I make it every fall to give away as gifts. People love it. However, the price of the ingredients (fresh figs, fresh ginger) made the chutney prohibitive to bring to market. Plus, I could get fresh figs only in the fall. When tested using ground ginger, it wasn’t good, and dried figs didn’t work either. So the recipe died on the vine. If you make a sauce at home, say, with fresh artichokes, consider that you’ll want fresh artichokes (and what that implies in terms of cost and availability) when you bottle it, too.
• Think about color. People will be turned off by an ugly sauce. Consider the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. I don’t recommend putting hot sauce in your ear, but you definitely want yours to have an appealing look, smell, texture, and taste.
• Consider the implications of your homemade hot sauce recipe as it relates to flavor, marketing, and future sales. Do you want it to be all-natural? How do you feel about salt? Does your sauce need thickening, and if so will you use a natural thickener? How do you feel about thickening your sauce with xanthan gum, which is a common thickening and stabilizing agent?
• Ponder the heat. How aggressive a sauce do you want? What kind of heat do you want it to have? Lingering? Front of mouth? Back of tongue? Do you want a singular heat (of one chile) or a medley of chiles playing off each other?
• What’s your vision? Do you see yours as an authentic regional sauce? A funny boutique sauce? A gimmick? Are you making sauce that will taste great on flounder in order to promote your seafood restaurant? Is it one of the smoldering “untouchables” that pushes the bounds of civility and decency? Articulating your vision will help shape the total package.
• Consider your theme when coming up with the name. (And check to see if your name has already been taken.) Are you going for a straight name, like Smokey Chipotle Sauce? A restaurant tie-in name, like Dinosaur Bar-B-Q Sauce? A hellfire kind of name? (My all-time favorite in this genre was a sauce called I Am on Fire Ready to Die.) Tongue-in-cheek poetry such as Inner Beauty? Chip Hearn, owner of Peppers, a shop in Dewey Beach, Delaware, that carries more than 3,000 spicy products, has these words of caution for getting into a crowded market: “My advice to someone who wants to start now is you better be 100 percent committed to your product being the best you can make it. Worry about the product first. After you’ve got it, then worry about the pricing. Do something that’s better than anybody else, something that’s special.” Dave Hirschkop of Dave’s Insanity fame echoes that sentiment: “Make sure you’re coming out with something that gives something to the marketplace. Test it, not with family and friends, but with strangers. Make sure people think it’s different or better.”

Consider Your Hot Sauce Packaging

Once you have a recipe and a name, you should think of how best to present your sauce to the public. Your product may be the best-tasting sauce in the world, but if it doesn’t stand out and grab people’s attention, or meet food safety and industry standards (which vary state by state), your product won’t sell.

One of the first considerations is the bottle style: 5-ounce woozy? Hip flask? Ketchup bottle? How’s your sauce going to look on the shelf at Walmart next to other products? Flask bottles are clever because they take up twice the shelf space in terms of width, and the label is easier to read because it’s flat rather than curving. But these bottles are typically bigger (6.7 ounces compared to 5), which has product pricing and shipping implications. Does your bottle pack easily, and how many fit into a case?  Don’t forget the design of the cap: Cholula is increasingly known worldwide for its iconic cap. (“Oh, yeah, the great sauce with the round wooden cap.”) In making Jump Up and Kiss Me, I splurged on a red (rather than the standard black) cap and a clear neckband dotted with red kisses.

You might also want to consider a nontraditional package. Dave’s Insanity sauce was sold in a wooden coffin, sealed with yellow and black caution tape. The package was funny and brilliant, catching the attention of buyers at food shows, retail customers, collectors, and the media. (The fact that Dave went to food shows wearing a straightjacket added to the buffoonery.) Scorned Woman was draped in a black velvet bag. Ultimate Burn featured a girl in a bikini that could be scratched off like a lottery ticket. Before making any decisions, figure out the cost; I once thought it would be great to create a hot sauce called “Squeeze Me” in a plastic bottle shaped like a woman (similar to the plastic honey bear bottles), but the cost of the package molding was prohibitive on the scale I was contemplating. Gimmicks aren’t all bad, and you should never underestimate the power of making your audience laugh. Just be mindful that if you have a clever package, a lot of people will buy it once, but if the sauce doesn’t taste good, they won’t buy it twice, and you want repeat customers.

Another key consideration is the label. At Wharton, my husband was told that blue food labels aren’t appealing. Think about it; you don’t see blue labels except maybe for Morton Salt. (We thought a powder blue label would look gorgeous next to our yellow passion fruit hot sauce in our Jump Up and Kiss Me line, and bucked the winds of wisdom, but I have to admit it’s our least popular seller.) In addition to color, think about what is required on a food label and what will matter to your audience. Nutrition labeling, for example, is not required to sell your product, but it matters to health-conscious buyers. Similarly, UPC codes are not required, but given that these codes are an increasingly common way to track merchandise, having one will bolster your chances of being picked up by chain stores, if that is your goal. If you’re just selling to friends and at local farmers’ markets, your label can be handmade. If you aspire to more than that, you should consider a printed label. A handmade label has a lot of charm and will appeal to collectors, but that’s a small segment of the market; many stores are not going to sell photocopied pictures taped to a bottle. And you’re going to get tired of the glue gun.