Origin Story

Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed in front of him. Kal-El was sent to Earth as a baby after his home planet was destroyed. I had a co-worker that asked me to try my hand at making a hot sauce. Every hero has their origin story.

I kid, I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m just a guy that loves being in a kitchen throwing flavors together.

When I was growing up, there were only the mainstay hot sauces readily available - Frank’s Red Hot, Tabasco, Mild, Medium, and Hot Taco Bell sauce packets - so I steered clear of them. Not to knock them, but they were mostly there to add heat and a touch of pain. They didn’t bring the flavor, at least not the kind I wanted.

So when my co-worker, knowing my love of cooking and baking, threw down the gauntlet after watching a few episodes of Hot Ones, I figured I’d give it a go.

The first sauce was….terrible. But there was something fun and exciting about creating something from scratch. It represented an opportunity to create something that I had always wanted to see in a hot sauce.

So I kept at it.

A few weeks later, I had my first good recipe, the Pineapple, Avocado, Serrano. It wasn’t blisteringly hot, but it brought a lot of flavor in front of the heat. My co-worker wanted something hotter, and honestly, so did I.

So I went back to the drawing board and started thinking about flavors that I loved that could be something special. The next sauce I came up with was what I jokingly called “The First Noserunner”. It was the basis of my Honey Mango Habanero sauce, Sticky Sweet Heat. My buddy and I put that sauce on everything: tacos, popcorn, crackers, ramen noodles. Then we started eating it by the spoonful.

From there I kept developing recipes, never really thinking about selling them. I was sitting on about 15 recipes that I absolutely loved and they all seemed to be pretty popular with my friends and co-workers. It took one person giving me $15 for a bottle for me to think this could potentially be a business. I haven’t stopped making hot sauces since and I’m happy to be able to start bringing them out to share with other hot sauce and flavor addicts.