Startups Innovators Hot Sauces Bring the Heat

Steve Seabury is typical of a generation of entrepreneurs who have applied their creativity, talents, and energy to hot sauces. “I always enjoyed making hot sauces and eating peppers and doing stupid things with spicy food,” says the music impresario who put together 600 bottles of his specialty sauce for the Metal Alliance Tour in 2011 and started High River Sauces.

Fast forward, and Seabury is selling a couple hundred thousand bottles of High River Sauces in about 800 U.S. grocery stores and online to 11 countries as well as organizing hot sauce festivals around the country each year where hot pepper aficionados sample new sauces, stage tongue-burning tasting challenges, and generally bask in a growing hot sauce culture.

There’s nothing hotter than hot sauces in the U.S. food business. The main demographic pushing this trend also is the one coming into its own economically: Gen Z members and younger millennials, who tend to relish new sensations and tastes, global twists, and inexpensive ways to supplement traditional foods.

American consumers are demanding more complex flavor profiles and are bringing the heat through expanded use of more fresh and dried chiles such as ghost peppers, chiles de árbol, and jalapeños. The latest trends include hot honey, a proliferation of “swicy”—sweet and spicy—products, and sauces that pop the top off the Scoville scale, a tool for measuring the spiciness and light-your-tongue-on-fire characteristic of hot peppers.

“COVID forced people to cook at home, and the average culinary explorer utilized products like our sriracha or spicy honey to elevate normal, tired cuisine,” says Dan Doll, CEO of Bushwick Kitchen, whose first product was Bees Knees Spicy Honey in 2014. “The other factor is market globalization: Specialty spices are a center point for a lot of different types of cuisines, and there’s a melting pot mindset in the United States.”

Specialty spices are a center point for a lot of different types of cuisines, and there’s a melting pot mindset in the U.S.

Dan Doll

Bushwick Kitchen

The seasoning category, including sauces, as well as condiments and spices, experienced an 11.4% rise in sales year-over-year through mid-2024, according to the Specialty Food Association, and a 49% rise in unit sales despite inflation.

Hot sauces are an experiential play, not really a better-for-you one. Hot peppers are low in calories and include no proteins, fats, or carbs. They contain small amounts of vitamin C, and their “heat profile” tends to clear up sinuses.

Indeed, the most important data point about hot sauces is—well, how hot they are. The index called Scoville heat units (SHUs) measures the amount of capsaicin, which causes the spicy heat in a pepper, and assigns it a numerical rating. Hot sauces have ratings that range from just a few hundred SHUs, which most consumers still consider pungent enough to call something “spicy,” to outlandish levels such as the 800,000 SHUs for Blair’s Ultra Death Sauce, which the producer recommends not be consumed “without dilution.”

The importance of younger consumers and of the hot-sauce “experience” is a natural for attracting entrepreneurs, similar to the microbrew startups that began in basements and garages a generation ago. Authenticity and variety are the coins of the realm for hot sauce entrepreneurs.

“I thought most hot sauces available were disgusting,” says Kelly Schexnaildre, a restaurant employee who founded Merfs Condiments 11 years ago. “Most of them were powdered chiles mixed with vinegars and sauce. I started using fresh chiles grown on farms, with onions and other veggies.

“So instead of adding a dash of spicy vinegar to food, I was adding real food, which helps you. I began using pineapple, peaches, mangos, habaneros, onion, garlic, ghost peppers, and apple cider vinegar instead of just white vinegar—apricots, figs, oranges. You name it and I’ll put it in hot sauce.”

Merfs now sports nine varieties of hot sauce, the spiciest being Cooyon [French for “idiot,” she says] Superhot, which contains apricots and habaneros but also enough capsaicin extract to register 6 million SHUs, which Schexnaildre calls “nuclearly hot.”

Still, growing competition from large companies, as well as inflation, is pressuring small brands like Merfs. So Schexnaildre is working harder at e-commerce. “In the restaurant business, everyone’s costs are going up astronomically, and hot sauce is a free option on tables,” she says. “Restaurants are not going to pay more than $5 a bottle to give away something for free.”ft