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MARKETWATCH GOURMET NEWS JANUARY 2014 www.gourmetnews.com Hot Sauces Continued from PAGE 29 after a year of researching and developing a business concept. When he started, he had been making hot sauces from his garden peppers and he knew about flavors and how to layer them. However, he did not have a point of reference for the direction that the hot sauce industry was taking at the time. Right away, he started creating sauces that were different from anything else on the market. His was the first company in the United States to use the Trinidad scorpion pepper in a commercially available sauce. Today, he sells his 1498 Trinidad Scorpion Sauce today for $7.95 a bottle, and he says it is not only a very popular sauce, but it is also his personal favorite. "Scorpion is one of the hottest peppers in the world, but the first time I tasted it, it had such an earthy, floral note, and I wanted to pair that with a sweet note," McLaughlin says. Today, McLaughlin's sauces are drawing attention from food critics and have won a number of awards from various hot sauce shows. Cook's Illustrated recently applauded the Heartbreaking Dawns Trinidad Scorpion Cauterizer Sauce for its exceptional combination of spectacular flavor with very high heat. Heartbreaking Dawns' Trinidad Scorpion Sauce incorporates a variety of sweet and spicy flavors for a sauce that illustrates McLaughlin's aesthetic. The same can be said for another of McLaughlin's creations, his Ghost Pepper Sauce. "It's the hottest pepper out there, but there's so much more to it than that," he says of the Ghost Pepper Sauce. "Ghost pepper on its own, heat aside, has an exceptionally wonderful citrus burst. I paired it up with a very nice pear and apple with soy sauce and white pepper in the background. It delivers a strong and satisfying heat, but it's by no means extreme, so it's a very useable sauce." When McLaughlin brings his sauces to the Fancy Food Show next July, he will find Case Fischer of Fischer & Wieser there waiting for him with some new hot sauces that he currently has under development. Fischer & Wieser introduced its first pepper product to the market in 1988 with a jalapeño peach jelly. "I was experimenting with peppers in our jams and jellies," Fischer recalls. "That was a real big hit because people put it on their pork chops." Fischer followed that product up with the Roasted Raspberry Chipotle Sauce that Fischer & Weiser also brought out in 1988. That sauce is currently the company's bestseller. "We focus on sauces, so that's where we focus our pepper experiments, and we have really enjoyed coming out with some new and exciting products," he says. "The pepper products that we come up with have got to have a lot of flavor with them, and it's not all about the heat." In developing the products that he plans to bring to the 2014 Summer Fancy Food Show, Fischer has been intrigued by the peppers at the hot end of the Scoville scale, including the ghost pepper, the scorpion pepper and the Scotch Bonnet. Still, he continues to focus on flavor as opposed to just heat. "We're also considering different fruits beyond the mango, the peach and the papaya," he says. "We are so far beyond red pepper flakes and jalapeños that it's not even funny. I think that's exciting." Once Fischer & Wieser's newest hot sauces are ready for the market, you are likely to find all of them and more in Rehoboth Beach, Del., at Chip Hearn's Peppers.com, a seriously vertically integrated company. With a very large retail store in a resort area and a strong online retail shop, Peppers.com is a wholesaler of 3,000 different zesty items, 200 different peppers, Mama Vincente brand items and a line of private label sauces. Hearn's hot sauces range in price from $1.99 to $1,000 a bottle, with the average hot sauce selling for $5.99 to $7.99. Hearn got into the hot sauce business 30 29 years ago when he was looking to increase the breakfast check average in his family's restaurants. He did that with the Bloody Mary Smorgasbord, in which he offered customers 200 different hot sauces to doctor their vodka and tomato juice. "Customers started asking for the bottles of the hot sauces, and then it became, 'I'm going to carry a case of that back with me,'" he recalls. "We started with 200 sauces, and now it's 3,000." One of his current bestsellers is Zing Zang, a Bloody Mary mix made in Chicago, a city where bartenders are known for putting their signatures on the classic Bloody Mary recipe. Hearn appreciates Zing Zang because it is a Bloody Mary mix that the average New Englander has not seen before. His customers are eager to buy it just to try it. "Zing Zang does not have to have anything else mixed in it, but you can grate some ginger on it or use some horseradish. When they get hooked on it, they have to come back to you because no one else is carrying it," he says. "It's spicy, it's zesty, and it's gone pretty fast, so they have to come back to the store." GN

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