We were lucky to catch up with Melanie Torvi Grant Basile recently and have shared our conversation below.
Melanie Torvi , appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
We started growing peppers in our parking space in front of our apartment building. Originally we just bought starters, but that evolved to us growing all of our plants from seed, and keeping that cycle going. The first year we had such a large yield of peppers that we needed to do something with them quickly. That led to coming up with some recipes for the peppers we had. We just used a regular canning method for that first batch. We were excited about the flavors we created, and couldn’t wait for the next season to try again & improve upon our recipes. Both of us have worked in the restaurant industry our entire lives, so the knowledge of flavors and using produce to it’s full potentials was already there. Still there was quite a bit of tweaking before we started giving out samples. By our third year we were bottling sauce instead of canning, and letting friends and family give their feedback. The feedback was so positive, that we then made the decision to go forward with the business idea of owning our own Hot Sauce Business. We then began the incredibly frustrating process of going through all of the hoops necessary to be fully FDA approved, etc. We had enough feedback on our flavors, that we began to scale up slowly. We jumped from making about 12 bottles of our flavors to roughly 12 cases. Which looking back now, is funny how crazy we thought that was. Our name came from my mother’s childhood nickname and habit of dressing up as a little Calamity Jane. We use her photo taken and developed by my grandmother. She was about 3-5 in all of the photos we have. We chose this name Nd images to honor her, as she had passed in 2019 of brain cancer. It is awesome to be able to talk about her on a regular basis as we do our markets .
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
We are Grant & Melanie, a husband/wife team from Seattle, Wa. We have been together as a couple for 14 years now, but friends much longer than that. We met through the underground music scene in Seattle in the early 90’s. It’s been pretty awesome to take our years of food industry experience into a new business venture. The love of hot sauce culminated in finally taking the leap into this world, and also as a tribute to Grant’s mother who passed away right before the 2020 covid lockdown. She is our muse on the bottles, and most of our artwork. Photos were taken and developed by my grandmother in the early 1950’s.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
What has absolutely helped build our brand is the relationships built over our many years in the restaurant/service industry. We have alot of connections that have absolutely helped get us into many new venues. Former coworkers have been very helpful in spreading the word about our sauce company. .
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
So far our most effective strategy has been three fold. We have been the face of our business as we do markets, which gives us face to face opportunity to explain our sauces to consumers directly. Secondly, being able to have those restaurant connections has enabled us to get a much larger group of people tasting our products at their favorite eateries. Finally, just trying to create cool insta reels helps get us into the minds of people that maybe never would’ve heard of us. Not exactly easy since we are old enough to be super tech savvy!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bootsiessauceco.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/bootsiessauceco
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/bootsiessauceco
- Other: [email protected]
Image Credits
N/A